> I was using a P4 3.0GHz HT with 2GB RAM and a Radeon HD 4650 1GB. Most MAME were NOT > playing at full speed, much less PC games > I am able to play about 80% to 90% of working MAME games at full speed. You said that > MOST MAME games were not playable at full speed, which means that you think that more > than 50% (half) of the MAME games are not playable at full speed. And that's totally > inaccurate. Just think how many old old school arcade games from the 1980's there > are. And almost all of them run at full speed. And the vast majority of early to mid > 1990's games run at full speed. So that's wayyy more than 50% of working MAME games.
Yeah a 3+ GHz P4 with a reasonably modern video card is definitely fine for most games in MAME.
I have said this before, but I recently replaced a 3.4 GHz P4 with an 1.6 GHz Pentium Dual Core (Core microarchitecture, not Pentium D) in my wife's PC. I didn't reinstall, just replaced the CPU.
From comparing FPS in MAME, the Pentium Dual Core is a little bit faster than the Pentium 4 was, which is funny when you look at the clock speed.
But the best part is that simply replacing the CPU totally cured some hanging/crashing issues in 64-bit Windows 7. Not sure if it was the motherboard (Gigabyte board w. Intel P43 and ICH10) or 64-bit Windows 7 that didn't like the P4 but there you go.