Sweet Hyperspin/Mame box dell deal

[scrapple]

If your looking for a system to run HS, here ya go... wont last long..

$289 for quad core box, 3gig ram, 500gb hd

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&kc=&oc=dddodg4&m_129=RECYCL

deal from slickdealssss

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=345299&t=938412

[scrapple]

dead now

[EVEGames]

In that same vein, although not nearly as high-end as Scrap's deal above, you can always find a deal on a decent machine at surpluscomputers.com.
Dig it: Dell (http://www.surpluscomputers.com/Dell_GX280_P4_3_2Ghz_512MB_40GB/COM10803/partinfo-id-348163.html)
Dig it: IBM (http://www.surpluscomputers.com/IBM_Thinkcentre_S50_P4_3_2GHZ_/COM10748/partinfo-id-348080.html)

If you get on their mailing list, you will get an email just about every day with their top deals. I've bought many times from them, never had any issues.

[joebells]

not putting your post down at all EVEGames but if I was in the market for a prebuilt machine I'd just keep watching slickdeals and fatwallet they post some killer deals for dells and others all the time. a quad core for 268 was a crazy great price, wish I would of been in the market for a computer and had the money :D I don't believe that I would get any of those computers that you linked to, just getting too old( I hate the p4 dang crappy netburst architecture) plus they are refurbed, for just a bit more you can get new and way better.

[EVEGames]

Yep, as I said, not nearly as high-end as that Slickdeal Dell. Surplus computers sells office computers coming off lease. As for me, I love P4s for a MAME rig. (I'm not mapping the human genome, I'm playing Pac-Man. :proud: ) There's $100 difference between that Slickdeal Dell and the Surplus Computers Dell, that ain't chump change. On a newer PC game or maybe a Playstation2 emulator, you would see a big difference in performance between the two. Playing Mortal Kombat in MAME, or Mario Brothers in VirtuNES, you would not.

I'd LOVE that quad core Dell for my main desktop machine! But the fact is MAME will COMPLETELY ignore 2 of those 4 cores.

[Banacek]

I'd LOVE that quad core Dell for my main desktop machine! But the fact is MAME will COMPLETELY ignore 2 of those 4 cores.

Yeah, but your OS won't.

[EVEGames]

Yeah, but your OS won't.

But Banacek, what does that have to do with the price of rice in China?
You don't need a quad core to run Hyperspin at full speed, nor do you need a quad core to run any of the emulators Hyperspin currently supports at full speed. Check me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of any emulators that are written to make specific use of quad core architecture.
My point is, why pay for a quad core when MAME will perform just as well with a Core2duo, or even a fast single core? More buck, very little bang.

But hey, don't let me discourage anyone from getting a cutting-edge computer for your Hyperspin rig! More power to ya, man. Faster CPUs and better motherboards certainly can't hurt your performance.

Again, if we're talking about a computer NOT solely dedicated to emulation, hell yeah go for broke! :burnout:

[joebells]

doesn't matter that mame might ignore 2 of the 4 cores, its still one more core than it had before and many of the chd games can use the extra umph, the new dell is still a way, way better deal at 100 bucks more than the old and horribly aged p4(seriously one of the worst designs they made, they made some changes so they could ramp the clock speed up, the changes made it do less per cycle, so to the average joe saw 3.4 compared to amd's 2.2 and thought well yeah the 3.4 is better when really that 2.2 was up there with the 3.4, man did I mention how much the p4 sucks)

[Banacek]

But Banacek, what does that have to do with the price of rice in China?
You don't need a quad core to run Hyperspin at full speed, nor do you need a quad core to run any of the emulators Hyperspin currently supports at full speed. Check me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of any emulators that are written to make specific use of quad core architecture.
My point is, why pay for a quad core when MAME will perform just as well with a Core2duo, or even a fast single core? More buck, very little bang.

But hey, don't let me discourage anyone from getting a cutting-edge computer for your Hyperspin rig! More power to ya, man. Faster CPUs and better motherboards certainly can't hurt your performance.

Again, if we're talking about a computer NOT solely dedicated to emulation, hell yeah go for broke! :burnout:

My point is that with MAME using two cores, normal system operations still need to steal clock cycles from one of the cores MAME is using. Now if you have four cores, MAME can sit on two of those uninterrupted. Personally, I have a Athlon 3000 XP in my cab, so I get none of this benefit :) But, if I have to upgrade and I can get a quad core on the cheap, I'm jumping on it.

[The Loafer]

It doesn't matter that Mame or other emu's do not presently support 4 cores. Who knows, they may next year and then you'll want to upgrade yet again.

[joebells]

mmmmmmm 8 core's(won't be too long :D and yes I know that not much would take advantage of all those cores, nor probably do enough individual things to tax that many cores but it'd be cool)

[The Loafer]

At the very least, you could heat the house with a pc like that.

[sp33dy]

I understand the argument for Mame not using more than 2 cores.. However. My main desktop with Quad core continues with Torrents, Filesharing, video editing etc, etc in the background whilst I'm playing games. Therefore, it's not necessary in a cabinet, but if like me you intend to keep up with PC games, it's going to be a must in the future.

I've had many debates with PC developers who state multi-core will never make it into games because they are single threaded applications. Well, people said in the 90's that GFX cards are a waste of time until Voodoo and 3dFX came along.

In my opinion, multi-core should enable: Main Thread for game, one for physics, one for AI, one for route calculation/resources, one for addition gfx/world mapping, one for image/movie skinning, one for multigaming as a smaller server (i.e. like p2p connections) to improve online gaming, etc... I make that 7 cores. I'm sure it'd be possible. Granted the main thread would do little else but co-ordinate the others, but you'd have one core left!!!! :-)

I just wish I didn't have a day job. I'm thinking of going 4 days per week and having a day to do this type of proving. Along with some other development. Multicore in my opinion is the way forward. Think about it, if you just did, your brain isn't single threading!!!!

[EVEGames]

For those who have been newly introduced to the hobby of arcade emulation through Hyperspin, understand that this hobby can cost you as little or as much as you want it to. You can make good use of anything at your disposal, from the dust-covered 15-year-old Pentium II 400MHz in your basement (Yes, you can breathe new life into that dinosaur and run dozens of classic arcade games on it, although not with Hyperspin as your front-end), right up through a brand new quad core. Just do your homework and understand the limitations of the hardware you choose with respect to the software and games you want to run. The good folks on this forum and others like BYOAC and Mameworld will be very helpful in that regard.

[scrapple]

im upgrading because of hyperspin, not mame..
hyperspin's flash animations chug my pc.....

[scrapple]

$199 - not bad

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?config_data=&c=us&cs=04&fb=1&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=bsddod8&s=bsd&dgc=BF&cid=7421&lid=197378

just add some ram