JAMMA Multi-Game Board Alternatives

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   I love the idea of multi-game boards like the blue elf and pandoras box - small, loads of games, plug 'n' play, save some wear and tear on my pcbs, etc. Nothing compares to the actual PCBs of course, but I've always been interested in emulation, and there's a time and a place for it!
But the multi-game boards I've tried have had poor sound quality and don't output the game's native resolution or frame rate. They're basically underpowered, so the emulation suffers. The look and feel of the original isn't really there. The fact that you can't add games or update easily is also a pain. 

So just out of interest, I've started to look at cheap options that have most of the same benefits as multiboards, but provide better emulation with native resolution and framerates, and are open for updates and new games.

One of the easiest and cheapest ways to achieve good emulation is with a small pc, groovymame, and the crt emudrivers. I got a cheap small form factor desktop (optiplex 780 £45) with a reasonable core2duo processor, cheap (£5) compatible ati radeon card, and a jpac. Easily under £80, and there's plenty of room in most cabs for that, so I should really have stopped there. But I wanted to go smaller!

So then I got an old hp NC6000 laptop with 1.5 gb ram, 1.4ghz pentium m, 30gb hdd for £25 all in. The crtemudrivers wouldn't install, but soft15khz worked fine, and works with groovymame. The CPU deals with mame surprisingly well - all the 8 and 16 bit 2d games i want to play run at full speed (apart from moonwalker which slows down a bit). But generally very good results for £50 all in including the second hand jpac).

But I felt I could go a bit smaller using a mini ITX mobo. I got a one<span style="line-height: 1.4;"> with 2.2ghz core2duo, 2gm ram, and a radeon x600 for £30. I added in a pico psu for £13, and set the whole thing up with 64bit groovyarcade to extract maximum performance. This also means it doesn't need Windows. Here it is sitting on top of the laptop (the mobo is 17cm by 17cm).</span>

The PicoPSU only needs a 12v line. I haven't measured how much power it needs, but it's possible that some JAMMA PSUs might provide enough. Then it really would be plug n play. But I'm currently using a 12v external power brick. There's no hdd - it boots from a usb stick and the roms are stored on another usb stick. It's got a full mame set, plus full sets for MD, SNES, NES, and MS. So about £75 including the memory sticks, power brick, and jpac. 

Anyone got any other ideas? Cheaper/better laptops? Smaller mobos? I think both the crtemudrivers and soft15khz can be picky about GPUs, so don't think just any radeon card would do. 

The only real dealbreaker for me is that the emulation needs to be the right 15khz resolution and framerate for each game. And obviously there needs to be enough CPU power to play the games!

I know that the raspberry pi can run mame, and this looks interesting:

http://thearcademan.net/connecting-a-raspberry-pi-to-an-old-15khz-arcade-monitor/

But I'm not convinced it would give perfect resolution and framerate with the downscaler used (think it might be interlaced rather than progressive). 

Edited by 2huwman - 22 February 2015 at 1:20pm

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