Running Emulators on Older PCs

[TwistedWhizz]

Does that not depend on what type of games he wishes to run on MAME? I would reckon as long as he avoids the newer Streetfighters and Killer Instincts etc, he should have fun building a retro MAME project on an older PC. I mean, I can't speak from experience here, but if you stick to the old classics you should be okay, even with a newer MAME32.

Somebody's bound to correct me on this....

[Trident]

MAME requires even more than a Nintendo 64 emulator. It can't even run smootly on my Celeron 850 MHz.

even if it's only used to run older games? all i'm interested in running is games from the 80's (donkey kong, pacman, galaga...ect) and some from the mid 90's (street fighter 2, killer instinct, samurai showdown...ect) if i can figure out how to do light gun games i'd like to have virtua' cop, police trainer...ect. nothing too amazing. The SNES versions of these titles (SF2, KI) work fine on it, but of course zsnes doesn't require direct3D, does mame?
I read an article about converting an old table top arcade machine to a mame system and the guy only used a pentium1, but all he ran was 80's games.

[Jale]

In that case, yes. That's possible.

[Trident]

In that case, yes. That's possible.

i've heard that i should probably be running an older version of mame because of my archaic computer.

[Yoster]

Dont know, I played PJ64 at half speed on my old Duron 900 Mhz. I dont know much about the Pentiums.

[Zach]

Celerons are crap CPUs so that's the first strike against your system. Low clock speed is the second.

As long as you stick to old classics like people have said, you should be able to run most games fine in MAME32. Also, if you have a problem running NeoGeo games at full speed, look for an emulator called NeoRageX. I could run almost any game with it on my old Cyrix MII 233mhz w/64MB RAM. And as far as I know DirectX/3D should run fine on a 4MB graphics card. That's what they had back in the day for 3D

[alcoatjez]

Even ZSNES can give problems when you have a PII. On my old PC (PII 266), some games like Secret of Mana would run pretty slow when there were a lot of enemies on the screen. I would also suggest using at least a PIII.

[Cloud802]

I don't know, my laptop has a celoron and it runs MAME just fine, along with GBA and what's done of the DS. I mainly use it for work though, my gaming computer usually takes the blow for my emulators.

[FatTrucker]

Older versions of Mame will run perfectly well on older hardware. For very old computers PIII, PII etc then I would recommend a version prior to 0.69 for a PII and prior to 0.106 for a PIII.

The current Mame version (0.114) won't like an old PC regardless of the game you are trying to run on it, since they did the major code overhaul a few versions back (0.107 I think).