The Rombox thread.

Ok, so it's been talked about, lets have a thread talking about little PC/Mac rom boxes. This thread is NOT for talking about emulation but more rather what can be used or what is a good design/size.
I've got a few pieces coming in soon so I'll do a write up with what it can and cannot run well. The real thing I'm trying to do is to make a box for an arcade cab using 31k. We'll see how it turns out. Anyhoo, talk about hardware and parts you're looking at and we can discuss.

The main thing I've noticed with PC in arcades is the video card not being able to prevent tearing and scrolling, I guess I mix between knowing how to set your emulation proper and a real decent video card shouldn't have the scrolling issues. I've always spent quite a bit of time with each app to make absolutely sure the pixels are uniform and are reproduced under the screen native rez so they are actually in par with the screen pixels, not the size, the actual screen pixels. Anyway, I know very little about computers but I'm eager to see what's the general concensus.

DZ has a box in his 31k and it looks really good, you won't miss low rez for nothing with that set up.

Cool thread. I had a nice setup with my previous Blast. I basically forwent the case entirely. I mounted the mobo, hdd and psu to the plywood. I used my pad hacked 360 controllers wired up to a jamma finger board. It made it real simple to go from mame to 360 usage.

As for the specs of the pc. It was an avg core 2 cpu with 4gb ram and a off the shelf ati card capable of working with soft15k. Configured mame to output the native res of the game. I had a manual res blast, so I just left it at 15k. My 360 went thru a UVC. I never really missed having the real board with this setup.

Specs wise I use 2 dual core dells with 4gbs of ram, and an ATI 4350HD in each. Mame doesn't really use the Graphics card for anything except scan lines and a few later games like blitz. I went with prebuilt systems cause I snagged one free and the other for $60 off amazon, and the two cards were a grand total of $60. I'm using them in 31K so I don't need a jpac for an interface, but I do use a JVS pack for controls.

I think the video card is key though. Some of them built in video cards are just really not that great at handling clean uniform perfect pixels, there's always that odd ball hanging there and then you have to dither the image...at less you're fine with it I guess and that's not even getting into tearing and scrolling.

ElectricGrave said:

I think the video card is key though. Some of them built in video cards are just really not that great at handling clean uniform perfect pixels, there's always that odd ball hanging there and then you have to dither the image...at less you're fine with it I guess and that's not even getting into tearing and scrolling.

Click to expand...

The video cards only purpose is to run crt_emu and add the scan lines. Also, as you saw on my setups the pixel count is perfect and there is zero screen tearing.

IBM Thinkpad W500
Has a dual core 1.8Ghz CPU and ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 (a slightly better Radeon HD 3650).

I've gotten it to run everything up to Naomi without issue.

I understand it can do 15khz as well, but I've never taken the time to hack that and a shell together to make it work.

True, they look awesome, I think those ATI cards are the shit!

oddly enough I just bought some stuff to build one earlier and am still waiting for it to get here.

i built an absolutely monstrous overpowered beast for my hyperspin rig. im pretty sure it can run even the newest PC games at medium settings at least yet all im using it for is hyperspin. intel i5-4690k 3.5 ghz, 16 gb ram, asus z97-a lga1150 mobo, radeon R9 4gb video card, and liquid cooling in a weird fruit crate shaped cooler master enclosure with handles.
figured overkill was better.

max 330 mega said:

i built an absolutely monstrous overpowered beast for my hyperspin rig. im pretty sure it can run even the newest PC games at medium settings at least yet all im using it for is hyperspin. intel i5-4690k 3.5 ghz, 16 gb ram, asus z97-a lga1150 mobo, radeon R9 4gb video card, and liquid cooling in a weird fruit crate shaped cooler master enclosure with handles.
figured overkill was better.

Click to expand...

How big is the rig itself? What id like to accomplish is something that would fit in a cab with zero fuss. When the case comes in I'll shoot some pics. This is what I have coming. I have some parts laying around that will also go in it.

This is great. Let's see some pics once you set everything up. I wouldn't mind seeing some pics of some other setups as well.

mine is too big to fit in a cab, although that was initially something i had been aiming for. honestly mine doesnt get used on a cab due to these things being an endless black hole of configuration. it kind of saps all the joy out of using them. especially if youre using one for an arcade machine because then you have to be even more meticulous with making sure every game and program outputs at the proper resolution so you dont harm your monitor at the worst, or be playing blindly at the least, constantly needing to have an lcd screen near by to plug into the rig to see what the hell is going wrong.
i just use mine mostly as a mame, turboduo, gensesis, and neo geo machine right now... i have been more or less afraid of it after installing one extension (joy2key) literally broke every configuration in every emulator i had configured, and took about 7 hours to redo all of it back to working again after uninstalling the joy2key program.
its all complicated as hell.

Which monitor are you using to run yours?

mine just sits next to my 55" samsung plasma tv, basically as any other game system does.

here is the case mine is built in
http://assets.coolermaster.com/global/uploadfile/upload/images/case/haf-xb-evo-dimensions.jpg

wow, dude, I've been using joy to key for years, never had an issue, weird. I also hook mine to my TV via VGA and use it as a console, old ass VAIO. My living room TV rotates as well and I use the X360 wireless receiver along with modded T6 sticks, all wireless, no problems with lag on fighting games nor anything else.

yea my HS setup definitely has some bugs, and honestly i dont have the time or knowledge to correct whatever the big issue with not having universal controls mapping to all emulators is. i really wish i didnt have to go in and manually config each and every emu (especially with ones such as sega super model where i cant even figure out how) but ehh... it works at least currently. definitely not the dream machine i expected it to be when i bought the 5TB hyperspin hard drive.

I set up my joy to key so I can work everything from the joystick...even the cursor...makes it easy for a seamless switcheroo of stuff, all my emus are in the start screen. Joytokey is very useful if you put the time into it. I even use it for my FPS games and play with a mission Joystick and a trackball, all through Joy to key, except the trackball of course. Old FPSs like Alien Vs Predator doesn't recognize joysticks well. Unreal Tournament played this way feels awesome, I'm still better with a keyboard and mouse but it's so much fun.

I have a couple of setups, but the main one I use is a dell optiplex that has an i7 which I believe is 3.2ghz, 8gb ram and a GeForce gt 730 2gb video card with full Hyperspin setup running everything I've thrown at it nicely. This case is pretty small and the video card I bought is slim enough to fit in the case. cpu processor speed is most important for emulation as everyone has said. For scan lines I use craftymechs slg mini. It was only $25 and just plugs in line with your vga connection, and it works great but the resolution has to be set to 640x480 or 1024x768 for it to work and it has a little switch to turn it on and off. He used to sell them himself on eBay but now they're only available through paradise arcade. It really does a nice job and doesn't use any of your pc's power. Running in 640x480 and enforcing a 4:3 aspect ratio with the slg really outputs a nice looking image.

I assume we are talking Mame machines mostly.

Let me give you guys some advice:

Generally speaking, Intel is the better option. Faster single threaded performance

Don't bother with a monster Quad or greater core cpu. Won't make a bit of difference with performance with Mame as it can't utilize it. A smoking faster dual core is all you need. i3, i5 or whatever. The higher the single threaded performance, the better.

If you use an Intel cpu, go into the Bios/uefi and disable Intel Speedstep. Speedstep does a great job of lowering cpu temps and power usage by throttling the cpu down to a slower clock speed and voltage during times of low cpu usage. However for more demanding Mame games it will cause frame rate stuttering. Especially noticeable with later Cave games. Not sure about AMD, but they do have an option called Cool'n'Quiet that works similar. If you run into frame rate issues, investigate disabling it.

Just because you like playing 2d games, don't undervalue the graphics card performance. If you are using Groovymame (which you should), buy at least a 4000 series Radeon. Newly updated CRT emu drivers now support newer AMD cards and that's generally the recommended path to follow. Going forward 5000+ series cards will be the recommended ones to use.

Once you get Groovymame down, look into using Groovymame ASIO. Takes just a few minutes to setup. Its use BASSASIO to allow Groovymame ASIO to talk directly to your soundcard bypassing DirectX. Results in lower audio latency. Very, VERY much worth setting up.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,142143.0.html

If you're using these strictly for mame, anything over an i3 is overkill. Mame only uses 1 core and the rest are handling background processing of the computer. Where a better processor comes into play is if you're going to emulate Naomi, TypeX, AW, and ect.

I guess an actual hardware post would be good too.




This is my MiniITX setup that's only a little bigger than a shoebox. Uses a $50 Pentium G3258 cpu, 8 gigabytes ram and 240gb SSD (which I already had on hand). Also not pictured is a passive cooled XFX Radeon 4350 video card.

total build cost was somewhere around $300ish since I already had the ram and ssd. I use mine with a PC CRT monitor, but if I was to put this in a cab you would obviously need to add on a J-Pac or similar.

Remember to disable the page file and automatic defrag for that SSD.
Also, if you're gonna use Windows XP for whatever reason, get a TRIM utility and run it every month or so to keep the SSD healthy.

Loving this thread. I've been doing some research on this as well with Groovymame and the CRT_EmuDriver at 15k in mind. Great to hear everyone's specs and configs.