Meatball Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 (edited) About 8 or 9 years ago I got a hankering to build my own arcade cabinet and fulfill one of my childhood dreams of 'Owning an arcade' machine. Back then I used Maximus Arcade as the front end and emulated MAME, Daphne and some old consoles (C64, Atari 2600, Coleco, NES) from my youth. I'm looking to refresh the box so I can upgrade some of the hardware. Seems like the best windows based FE options out there are either LaunchBox or GameEX. I've got a few questions that I was hoping folks could clue me in on about LaunchBox before I take the plunge. Here's what my new hardware setup will be: Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H CPU: Intel i3-3225 (3.3 Ghz) GPU: Radeon HD 4550 Memory: 2 x 4 GB (8 GB) G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3/1666 HD: Toshiba OCZ RD400A M.2 128GB SSD Sony KV-27FS120 Trinotron TV/Monitor Ultimate Arcade II Cabinet Some Spiffy Side / Marquee Art X-Arcade Tankstick + Trackball Controller So, here's a few questions (I'll probably think of more after I post this. :)) That hardware be up to snuff for running LaunchBox and a bunch of emulators or am I overkilling it? What's the best OS for me to use? Win 7 or 10? x32 or x64? What makes LB better than GameEX? Did I miss a thread somewhere that already goes into all of these questions? Any input would be much appreciated! Edited November 21, 2016 by Meatball Fixed some typos Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 Hey @Meatballwelcome to the community! 1. Your hardware should be good for LB its self and most emulators to it may struggle with things like Demul if you wanted to run Arcade games from it. Is it a strictly Arcade and more simple console setup or do you have controllers too and hope to emulate things like Wii PS2 I'm not sure how those would preform with an i3 as I've never run them on anything less then an i5 personally 2. LB currently works with Vista and up and it is said that Windows 10 is the best with the versions of .net that LB uses and if you have 8GB of RAM you would need to have the 64 bit version or you would be maxed out at 4GB 3. I'm not a GameEx user but before I found LB I had it working to some degree but it isn't as easy to setup as LB is that is for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meatball Posted November 21, 2016 Author Share Posted November 21, 2016 (edited) 1 hour ago, DOS76 said: Hey @Meatballwelcome to the community! 1. Your hardware should be good for LB its self and most emulators to it may struggle with things like Demul if you wanted to run Arcade games from it. Is it a strictly Arcade and more simple console setup or do you have controllers too and hope to emulate things like Wii PS2 I'm not sure how those would preform with an i3 as I've never run them on anything less then an i5 personally 2. LB currently works with Vista and up and it is said that Windows 10 is the best with the versions of .net that LB uses and if you have 8GB of RAM you would need to have the 64 bit version or you would be maxed out at 4GB 3. I'm not a GameEx user but before I found LB I had it working to some degree but it isn't as easy to setup as LB is that is for sure. Thanks! As for your questions/comments: 1) To be honest, not really sure which Emulators I'll be using yet. Like I said, been a while since I've messed with things, I was using MAME as my Arcade emulator and Daphne for Laserdisc stuff. For all the console emulators I was using various Stella for the 2600, MESS for Colecovision, NESStopia for the NES, Gens for the Sega Genesis and WinVice for the C64. As for controllers, I was using the Tankstick mapped as controller for all the systems. I've been considering maybe trying to add some actual legacy controllers to the mix, but that's not a requirement. I'll try the i3 for now and see how it goes, but keep an eye out for an i5-3570 or i7-3770. I do also have some other Motherboards/CPU's lying around I could repurpose including an AMD X4 740 Quad Core and an AMD A10-6800K, but I think the Intel parts are probably a better bet. 2) Yeah, I know I need x64 to run >4GB of RAM, just wasn't sure if LB worked better with the x32 OS and I should drop down to 4 GB of RAM. Edited November 21, 2016 by Meatball Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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