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[milkmycow]

I have a mame cabinet with a pretty decent 3.0ghz p4/1.5gb ram/etc and a friend wants me to build one for him.

I am trying to decide on buying a used PC or going with an xbox 1. I have never used xbox 1 emulator though.

Would it be a good alternative or should I stick with pc?

[Xmodder deluX]

I'm not into MAME much on the PC, but on the xbox it is pretty good.  I would recommend downloading Coinops Reignite Showcase.  It has video support for many games and many other great features as well.  Check it out on youtube.

[milkmycow]

thanks for the tip, that looks like a pretty good program.

I know a lot of roms on PC need a decently powerful system to run. I guess you havent really had many problems with choppy gameplay or incompatibility?

[cbagy]

CoinOps is pretty good on Xbox. You will have to do away with certain demanding roms from the PC install and downgrade them using a tool such as romcenter as CoinOps uses the core from mame0.84 (i think) so roms have to be built to suit. CoinOps is really just an updated MameOx variant with a new GUI and more rom drivers added. A few options have been added (as well as removed). Over all its a very good emulator.

[obcd]

The xbox uses a Celeron 666Mhz cpu and has 64Mb of ram.
So, everything that worked fine in Mame on a pc with the same spec's, should work on the xbox emulator as well. All emulated systems that used an 8 bit cpu should work without problems. Systems that used a 16bit cpu will likely work without issues. All the more recent emulated systems will be very difficult to emulate fullspeed. You can start using tricks like frameskipping, but the result will never be 100%.

Most games are 2D. I don't think an expensive 3D accelerated video adapter will give a huge performance boost on a pc.

The limited memory of the xbox is less a problem than it would be on a pc, as the xbox doesn't has an operating system that consumes the memory for you.

A question that might arise as well, what monitor will you use in your mame cabinet. If it's a vga screen, a pc might be a better solution. If it's an arcade monitor, it might be easier to connect an xbox.

Another advantage of a xbox is the fact that you can find a lot of second hand very good non mame games as well for it.

A second hand xbox should not exceed 50 euro in price. A second hand decent computer might cost 200 euro without a decent video adapter. If you wan't a decent harddisk in your xbox, you might add another 50 euro to it's price.

regards.

[VampX]

QUOTE(obcd @ Nov 18 2009, 10:41 AM)

The xbox uses a Celeron 666Mhz cpu and has 64Mb of ram.

Actually its a 733 MHz Intel Custom Pentium III.

[Consoleman!]

A PC MAME cab is always going to be better and infinitely better when properly setup, but if cost is an issue then an Xbox can be had for pretty cheap.

PC advantages:

+ Sharper image with the potential to output each game in their proper video modes
+ More\superior GUI options
+ Flexible CPU\RAM options, which improves game compatibility

PC disadvantages:

- Can be more expensive
- Harder to setup

Xbox advantages:

+ Probably cheaper
+ Easier to setup (assuming you already know how to FTP through the Xbox)

Xbox Disadvantages:

- Blurry image
- CPU and RAM limitations
- Game compatibility isn't as high
- Only 1 GUI (but a decent one)

Here's the HyperSpin GUI for the PC:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-xdeUmuBKo

And the CoinOPS GUI for Xbox:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3MgoLAbqF4

[VampX]

Personally I'd put a pc in there, for better upgrade possibilities in the future.

Also the xbox can not properly emulate even the simpler games like MK1/2/3/umk3/nba jam/nba jam te/etc.
And would you really want a system in there that can't even run those classics?

neh, pc all the way for a cab.

[DarthMingus]

Since when is the Xbox output blurry? I have an HDTV and its nice and crisp as long as you turn the filtering off in the emulators.

[cbagy]

I can confirm mine isnt blurry at all in HD !

[Consoleman!]

QUOTE(DarthMingus @ Nov 19 2009, 10:12 PM)

Since when is the Xbox output blurry? I have an HDTV and its nice and crisp as long as you turn the filtering off in the emulators.

Xbox MAME output via SDTV is extremely blurry due to a combination of bilinear filtering and flicker filter.  Turn off flicker filter and the screen flickers, while turning off bilinear filtering causes geometry deformities.  The reason I mention SDTV first is because most actual MAME cabs I'm familiar with tend to run SDTV or an arcade monitor.

HDTVs are more forgiving with flicker filter, so it can be turned off.  Turning bilinear filtering off, however, removes blur at the expense of geometry deformities due to the game resolution not being in alignment with the emulated video output.  Bilinear filtering helps mask this, but at the expense of texture shimmer and blur.  Texture shimmer occurs when bilinear filtering attempts to recreate the missing geometry on the areas of the screen where the geometry is missing.  For example, if 1 row of pixels are missing, bilinear filtering may attempt redraw it with 3 blended pixels.  Whenever certain textures scroll past that area, the screen shimmers.  Static screens like Ms. Pac-Man or Donkey Kong aren't as noticeable since they don't scroll.

So yeah, you *can* have a sharp picture if you run HDTV and don't mind deformed graphics or you can add some blur & shimmer with bilinear filtering.  Running a software filter like Simple2x helps alleviate some of the blur, but it doesn't solve the geometry issues that exist in the Xbox ports of MAME.