NoahsMyBro
12-30-2002, 09:36 PM
I've got about a dozen Pentium 133-166 vintage PCs in my garage right now. Most of the systems have 2 1.5g drives each. There are a smattering of 4 or 6g drives, as well as a few K6-2/366 turbochips.
I was toying with the idea of finding the best of the lot and building a dedicated MAME station.
I have a few questions for the more seasoned of you guys:
* Will I be able to play games up to the mid-to-late 80's satisfactorily on this hardware?
* I'd prefer to make the system Linux-based. I've seen a few systems running MAME on Windows with a GUI front-end that is very attractive - it lists all of the different games in a window-pane on the left, and displays info about the game in a pane on the right. Once you select & start a game of course the display becomes a full-screen display of the game you chose. Is this possible within Linux? WOuld it require Gnome or KDE? I don't think GNOME or KDE will run well with such old hardware.
And, in longer-range thinking, this won't happen soon, but eventually I'm thinking I'd like to build an arcade cabinet for the system, and rig it up in my garage. How difficult complicated is it to run the system using arcade controls rather than a PC keyboard? I can't afford to get something like the Slikstik or X-Arcade controllers, and was thinking about (way down the road) getting various arcade controls myself and wiring them up.
One thought I had was to have different control panels for specific games. In particular, I want a panel that exactly duplicates Defender (or Stargate) and to use that for that game. Also, if I did something like this, I assume I'd also build an Asteroids panel as many games used the same button layout.
I was toying with the idea of finding the best of the lot and building a dedicated MAME station.
I have a few questions for the more seasoned of you guys:
* Will I be able to play games up to the mid-to-late 80's satisfactorily on this hardware?
* I'd prefer to make the system Linux-based. I've seen a few systems running MAME on Windows with a GUI front-end that is very attractive - it lists all of the different games in a window-pane on the left, and displays info about the game in a pane on the right. Once you select & start a game of course the display becomes a full-screen display of the game you chose. Is this possible within Linux? WOuld it require Gnome or KDE? I don't think GNOME or KDE will run well with such old hardware.
And, in longer-range thinking, this won't happen soon, but eventually I'm thinking I'd like to build an arcade cabinet for the system, and rig it up in my garage. How difficult complicated is it to run the system using arcade controls rather than a PC keyboard? I can't afford to get something like the Slikstik or X-Arcade controllers, and was thinking about (way down the road) getting various arcade controls myself and wiring them up.
One thought I had was to have different control panels for specific games. In particular, I want a panel that exactly duplicates Defender (or Stargate) and to use that for that game. Also, if I did something like this, I assume I'd also build an Asteroids panel as many games used the same button layout.