Computer

I will have to say that this is one smoking MAME machine!  Difficult to run games such as MK3, NBA Jams, and most Neo Geo games never frame skip. Only a few of the late 90's games ever frame skip.  I decided on an Athlon primarily because it offered more bang for the buck than a Pentium III.  The motherboard is an Abit KT7 with the VIA KX133 chipset for Socket A.  I choose the Abit board because it has an ISA slot, received good reviews, and because it has a heatsink/fan on the VIA chipset which should improve stability when overclocking the FSB.  If some of this jargon is foreign to you, I would suggest perusing through a few sites like Club Overclocker, Athlon OC, etc.

I picked each of the peripheral components for a specific reason.  The STB Velocity 128 video card was chosen for top framebuffer performance under DOS.  The Nvidia Riva128 chipset was one of the last chipsets released before the wave of true 3D chipsets and has some of the best framebuffer performance around.  Another reason I used the STB video card was because I picked it up for thirty bucks.  I made sure that the memory was the fastest I could get (PC150) and that the latency was low (CAS2).  I used the SoundBlaster AWE64 for compatibility reasons and I have had no problems what-so-ever with the sound in MAME.  Lastly, the hard drive is out of my PC after I upgraded it to a larger one.  A 4GB hard drive is large enough to hold MAME and all the ROMs I could ever want.

Specifications

• AMD Athlon Thunderbird 800Mhz overclocked to 896MHz (8x112MHz)

• ABIT KT7 Socket A motherboard

• Cooler Master Socket A Fan

• Mushkin 128MB HSDRAM PC150 CAS2 (Clocked at 149MHz)

• STB Velocity 128 AGP 2X 8MB

• Creative Labs SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA

• 4GB IBM Deskstar EIDE hard drive

• Antec 300W ATX mid-tower case

SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks

CPU Benchmark

• ALU: 2527 MIPS

• FPU: 1196 MIPS

Memory Benchmark 

• ALU: 466 MB/s

• FPU: 580 MB/s

Software

• Windows ME in DOS mode

• ArcadeOS

• DOS MAME customized with Scott's timing formula and no nag patch

Scott's Timing Formula

By leveraging my experience with VGA controllers and my profession as a software engineer, I was able to develop an algorithm to automatically generate the exact resolution required by each video game in MAME.  This works by calculating the necessary CRTC values, setting the pixel clock, and using a few VESA BIOS tricks.  It is similar to the tweaked modes in MAME but infinitely more flexible.  The monitor timing is generated with  generic parameters defined in the mame.cfg file.  VBE 3.0 (VESA 3.0) is required for the software to run.  This algorithm works quite well on my MAME system as well as my regular system that has a Matrox card.  The readme file has some information on how it works.  You must apply a patch and recompile MAME in order to install it.  I don't have enough space to store binaries on my site.

Download the readme file

Download Scott's Timing Formula

No Nag Patch

Since I was monkeying around with the MAME source code anyway, I removed the game information screens to ensure that MAME goes directly to the game without having to press any additional keys.

One Key Power On

I modified a Belkin power strip with a 12V 15A relay to trigger the rest of the outlets when the computer is turned on.  This works by powering the computer from the one "always on" outlet and when the computer is turned on, the 12V from the power supply is sent to the relay to trigger the rest of the outlets that are in series with it.