MAMEWorld Forums - Hardware - Re: Smallest possible box I can run MAME 0.147 on?

> Why do you need 8GB to run MAME?! Man. I mean, what kind of horsepower did the old
> arcade machines have? Surely they are not more powerful than a $200 nettop PC? I
> realize they were machines dedicated to a single task, whereas computers are not and
> they must emulate. But still. AdvanceMAME, as old as it is, can still play many ROMs
> and runs fine on low-end hardware. Why can't MAME, what's so different about it?

For a simple MAME rig, you could just about pick up an old Pentium 4 or even an early Core 2 Duo from an e-waste or junk pile on the side of the road. Throw on XP and you have a decent gaming rig, provided the board and/or the PSU wasn't trashed. A Pentium 4 should be able to run anything right up to and including the PlayStation era (although the latter might be a bit slow; Tekken Tag runs at around 70-80% on my 2.8GHz Prescott test rig, while Tekken 1 is almost full speed).

If you go even older, I have also run MAME 0.147 on a 1.2GHz Celeron and 256MB SDRAM without trouble, although such a system is pretty much limited to the 8-bit era (although Street Fighter II and other 16-bit era games can run at 100% using earlier builds of MAME, like 0.89 which has been on that particular machine since that build was released).