Mame on an Atom

Marbo · February 18, 2020

I've just picked up an Acer notebook with an atom processor. It's apparently running windows 10 home 64 bit with just 1gb ram. I paid flupence for it just out of curiosity. I have an old ssd to put in and if I can get 2gb stick for next to nothing then I would upgrade the memory.

Question is what would be the best os to put on it to run mame. Looking at old 80's arcade games, if I'm feeling really adventurous I might even build a cab.

Doesn't need to go online so an older unsuported Windows version would not be an issue.

Bombastinator · February 18, 2020

8 minutes ago, Marbo said:

I've just picked up an Acer notebook with an atom processor. It's apparently running windows 10 home 64 bit with just 1gb ram. I paid flupence for it just out of curiosity. I have an old ssd to put in and if I can get 2gb stick for next to nothing then I would upgrade the memory.

Question is what would be the best os to put on it to run mame. Looking at old 80's arcade games, if I'm feeling really adventurous I might even build a cab.

Doesn't need to go online so an older unsuported Windows version would not be an issue.

Linux or a BSD. A really lightweight one. Can you handle ditching the GUI entirely?

Those atoms were low clocked single sometimes dual cores. I’m kind of astounded win10 runs on it at all to be honest. Probably running the OS is about all it can do.

Marbo · February 18, 2020

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Linux or a BSD. A really lightweight one. Can you handle ditching the GUI entirely?

Those atoms were low clocked single sometimes dual cores. I’m kind of astounded win10 runs on it at all to be honest. Probably running the OS is about all it can do.

It's a 1c 2t cpu @ 1.66ghz so yep I was surprised to see 10 on it.

I've not received it yet so can't tell you how much resources are being used but I'd guess all of them.

I could probably get by without a GUI to set it up, I'm sure the mame forums will have tutorials, then get it to boot straight into mame.

Bombastinator · February 18, 2020

5 hours ago, Marbo said:

It's a 1c 2t cpu @ 1.66ghz so yep I was surprised to see 10 on it.

I've not received it yet so can't tell you how much resources are being used but I'd guess all of them.

I could probably get by without a GUI to set it up, I'm sure the mame forums will have tutorials, then get it to boot straight into mame.

There are some really lightweight guis. Gnome isn’t one. There are versions of KDE that aren’t bad, or there used to be

ulvheid · February 22, 2020

Hello,

you can check out Recalbox, but there is no guarantee it will work fine. Without testing you won't get to know (especially with Atom processor). It's a nice OS with all what you need to run old games.

Eventually you can install lightweight Arch Linux with also lighweight enviroment. Or Debian, but without all suggested packages. i3, openbox, LXDE i XFCE should be suitable for it.

Marbo · February 23, 2020

This whole mame thing gets really complicated fast.

I've put xp 32 bit onto it to check the machine. I'm going to try 0.106 through advancemame and see if it runs the games I want. If not then I'll look at arch Linux.

Thanks for all the input.