Vlad, there is a reason for the PCI bus, it has to do with securely mounting the card inside the arcade boxes. Since the boxes were originally designed with MAME in mind, in which graphics card power means very little.

I guess I just didn't count on these styles of games needing as much horse power as todays top shelf 3d games, so I went with a higher end PCI card figuring it would handle most, if not anything 2d / psuedo 3d that would thrown at it. Am I wrong in this assumption?

I'll try to get some research on the average cpu/gfx setups for everyone. I would assume it would similar to the lower end of the current PC market.

I have a test box that is running a 1.7ghz p4, 512ram and older 64mb Geforce2 card. I would be more than happy to test anything on it. Sprite Demo, etc.

I understand that because of historical reasons, such a powerful card (GF-FX5200) is more than enough for older arcade games. Though I`d be interested to know why is PCI card mounted more securely than AGP card. But if I saw the setup, it would be probably clear to me.

As for your assumption, I`m not saying it was wrong. It`s definitely very fast system for anything 2D (or pseudo3D) or something full-3D and 4-years old.

Could you try our Avenger game from our site: www.avenger.sk ?

Thanks

I'll give it a try as soon as I get home and let you know how it runs.

Without a case for the video card to be securely screwed into, the motherboard is mounted vertically along the back of the box. The video card is placed in the closest expansion port to the back making it easy to secure to the wood in the back useing a spacer and screw. All microATX boards I have seen have the agp or PCI-E port closer to the middle of the board, making it a bit more of a challenge to 1. Secure it and 2. Keep it away from the middle of the box where joysticks/buttons might be. This is done to keep the boxes as slim as possible.

If you all really don't think the PCI card is enough horsepower, I can try and move things around to allow for agp instead. Like I mentioned, this was done only because I thought that PCI card would provide enough power for even today's arcade style games.

I have a poll running on another forum to gather info on common specs in the market.

Vlad,

The game ran fine on my test system.

OK, well I got some good feedback from those with arcade cabinets.

I'll break it down a bit.

23 people have responded to my post so far. I'll update this as more people respond.

CPU:
1.3ghz or less - 2 (1ghz and 1.2ghz)
1.40-1.8ghz - 9
2-2.9ghz - 9
3ghz or more - 3

MEMORY
256 - 6
512 - 11
1024 or more - 6

Video (all agp)
Less than 64mb - 4
64mb - 4
128mb - 12
256mb - 3

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the statistics. So far it seems that everything is over 1 GHz, which is enough for basic 3D. I know that people don1`t buy these things for 3D games, but if there`s some new market for our games, why not try to make use of it, right ?

Ed: I sent you a PM 3 days ago, but you probably haven`t spotted it, so send me an email to vrepcak@seznam.cz regarding the demo of our game that you tried at home recently.

Thanks

Vlad, I replied to you PM, FYI.