Lordmonkus

Some people were reporting over on /r/emulation that they were able to do the 10$ + 20$ upgrade.

Get the Mame core that doesn't have a year after the name, all the ones with years are the older ones and built off of Mame code of that time.

If you got room to work you could probably put something together for a decent price with a micro atx motherboard and an Intel G3258 CPU. Here is a parts list I put together a little while back for a system I would build Intel Pentium G3258 Asus H81M-K or ASRock H81M-HDS LGA 1150 Motherboard G.Skill Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 EVGA 400W ATX Hard drive and Video card of your choosing. For a video card I would put something with 1 gig of GDDR5 vram in it so it could handle HLSL or BGFX shaders without issues.

Retroarch will give you far more shader and effects options over the stand alone Mame if you are going to use any sort of CRT type of shader. The Retroarch CRT shaders are meant for horizontal oriented games and look bad on vertical ones. But if you aren't using a CRT shader with scanline effects that shouldn't be an issue. If you are looking for the "smoothed" look there are some options in the Retroarch shaders. Personally I cannot stand the smoothed look at all, I much prefer the CRT look. Resolution scaling is not really an option.

No problem.

Check in the controller settings in BigBox mode, they are separate from each other.

Retroarch Mame controls suck because you got the Retroarch controller config and then you got the Mame controller config fighting each other. This is another one of the reasons I really dislike Retroarchs Mame over the stand alone.

Indeed these are very nice looking. I'd classify them as "Digital Box Art" or "Digital Store Box Art" or something along that line for scraping and categorizing.

When it comes to something like a bartop build you have the 3 way tug of war between price, power and size. You can have any of the 2 but you cannot have all 3. If you want cheap you can have small but limited power and lower your expectations. If you want small you can have it cheap or powerful but not both.

Yeah I wouldn't know using Mame itself, I could only get Mess to load stuff outside of arcade games, either way I highly doubt that the emulation quality of the Playstation would be anything worth talking about at this point in time.

If you want to use a PI I would just suggest EmulationStation and keeping your rom selection small and selective. You would also need a very specific Mame romset for it. If you google Mame4all romset you should find it. That would keep things cheap. Otherwise depending on how big the bartop is going to be you might be able to work something in there depending on your budget as well.

So it does load but it's not in anything resembling a usable state.

I haven't tested this out personally but others have said that the Intel Compute Sticks are decent enough for emulating up to 16 bit systems. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883800012&ignorebbr=1 That's the cheapest one with a 1.4 GHz cpu which should be fine depending on which emulators you use. For SNES you will have to stick with Snes9x, it's not fast enough for BSnes at all.

Does Mame even support PSX ? Even if it did I wouldn't use it when we got ePSXe, Xebra, Mednafen and Retroarchs Mednafen core for it. All much better PS emulators even if Mame did support it. Maybe some day in the distant future Mame will support it and be on par with the rest of the options.

It might be something to do with the Xeon CPUs, like I said in that other thread I have it setup on a very modest system and running fairly smoothly. And on my main gaming rig AMD 8350, 16 Gigs Ram and GTX 970 Video Card and runs smooth enough.

Take a look at the thread right below yours at the time of this posting.

For starters a Pi won't run Launchbox or HyperSpin. For a Pi you will be looking at something like AttractMode or EmulationStation for a front end. But if you want information on building take a look over here at these forums, all sorts of useful information: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,1.0.html

Even though you are using a fresh install of Windows that doesn't mean there isn't more that can be done to speed it up. Out of the box there are still a lot of CPU hogging services going on in the back ground and you can disable a good many of them to help boost performance. I have a HTPC I just converted out of my parents old computer which is: Windows 7 32 bit AMD Athlon 3800 @ 2.4 GHz 2 Gigs Ram 160 gig hard drive (non ssd, might not even be SATA, can't remember) Radeon 7800 series video card with 1 gig GDDR5 vram It is not much of a pc at all but after turning off all the unnecessary services such as print spooler, the crap that makes windows look fancy and many others when I open my task manager I have less than 30 processes running and total ram usage is under 500 megs with nothing running. Obviously Launchbox / BigBox will change the memory usage but that is how much head room is left to work with. I also do everything you mentioned about like turning off transitions and the image mirror opacity is set to 0 and with just about 2400 games things run pretty smooth. I wouldn't call it super creamy butter smooth but it's pretty darn good and not something I am wishing would be faster. To learn about all the services you can disable to help gain back a lot of extra ram and cpu cycles I recommend blackviper.com. I have used this site for many years now to help tweak my systems to make them run faster. Just check every service follow the guide, if you are unsure about a specific service instead of just flat out disabling it set it to manual and Windows will turn on the service if needed. http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-7-service-pack-1-service-configurations/

I don't believe the shaders you are specifically looking for are available but there are some options using the BGFX shaders. The Retroarch Mame core is fairly up to date, not quite the latest version of Mame but it's not far behind. If you want to take a look at the BGFX shader check out a tutorial I did on it here:

That's approximately the same number I ended up with doing a full import excluding the clones, casino and mahjong games. I also went through and manually removed about another 150.

For anyone even thinking about building a cabinet take a look over on the arcadecontrols.com forum boards. A lot of great information and advice over there. http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,1.0.html

Ahh.

Oh it does do some nice stuff like better Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field but I don't find the performance hit worth it for me. I hate DoF and always turn it off in any game and AO is something that you notice if you can pause the game and turn it on and off to look for it specifically but in actual gameplay you will never notice it. I have installed a current ENB just for the frame limiting functionality since I have a 144 Hz G-Sync monitor and just using it for that function alone it was still a 10 fps hit. So now I just use RIva Tuner to limit my frame rate to 60 to prevent the amazing Skyrim physics bug when opening doors when the frame rate is over 60 and sending all the shit in the room flying all over the place.

ELE is nice, I don't use an ENB at all, all the texture packs and other graphical settings push my framerate to a point where using an ENB pushes it to a point where it's just too slow to be enjoyable. ENB will generally eat at least 10 frames a second or more depending and in a place like Riverwood which is one of the graphically heavier areas of the game I get around 45 fps there. Much like shaders in Retroarch the colour corrections and other effects of an ENB are personal preference and I found I don't really like the look of most ENBs except for the really heavy performance hitters which become unusable on my system. The new lighting and shadows in the Special Edition remove the need for an ENB to fix that aspect and the fact that the game is now a Direct 11 game and can handle more than 4 gigs of ram means the memory hack part of ENB isn't needed either so in the end ENB now is just for colour adjustments which I don't really need.

Set your controllers up in your emulators first.