PC

The guys on alt.games.mame and arcadecontrols.com always pointed to a couple of games running under MAME as the biggest CPU and memory hogs back around that time:

• S.T.U.N. Runner
• Street Fighter: The Movie

...and that maybe one of those games really needs 257 MB of RAM, and one of the latest Athlons or Pentiums. In other words, no way would my PII 350 MHz PC handle the load. Gyruss and Tapper are fine on it, but for some of the newer games I play, especially all the NBA Jam's, I'd need the big guns. As luck would have it, Governer Roy Barnes set up "Shop Georgia," a weekend with no sales tax on computer systems. So www.pcusa.com over there on Jimmy Carter Blvd assembled a nice Athlon system for me to my spec, with no sales tax and a 5% cash and store pickup discount. I didn't snap a photo before I set it all up. So here is it, already resting inside the cabinet: AMD Athlon XP-1800+, 1.53 GHz 266 FSB


Gigabyte 7DX+ Motherboard
(I liked the on board Creative Labs sound chip, so I could save a few bucks. It also allows wakeup from a usb mouse/keyboard, which would be helpful for a machine inside a cabinet but it doesn't seem to work! No need for the RAID version)

512 MB DDR RAM
(Plenty! I knew my Authorware front end would be kind of bulky sitting there after I launch a game, so 256 might not have cut it)

32MB GeForce-2 MX200 4X AGP
(Why splurge on stout 3D performance in a Mame cabinet? This was their cheapest nvidia graphics chip card)

52x IDE CD-ROM
(Again, the cheapest. I only use it for the PC CD-ROM version of Dragon's Lair I bought)

Samsung 20GB, 5400 RPM, ATA100
(Cheapest, and 20GB is plenty for my ROMs, emulators, and front end. I was also concerned with the noise produced by 7200 RPM's)

This system worked out well. Check out pcusa.com, especially if you can pick it up in Atlanta and save a buck or two on shipping. The cheap keyboard, speakers, and mouse that came with it do the job but I'm glad I don't use them everyday.

I run Win98 SE in the cabinet. As far as Windows versions go, it's pretty stable.