A dual core PC will run a very high majority of MAME games just fine. Some of the driving games and a few other newer games will still be a slide show, but if you have a dual core laying around I would stick with that to save money and invest in a Ultimarc Arcade VGA card, and other good high quality controls (joysticks, spinner, trackball, guns) and the associated driver boards (ipac and opti-pac)that go with them. The other biggie is a monitor. Vice dropping cash into a newer PC I would invest in an arcade monitor. I would take an existing arcade cabinet for a 25" monitor and gut it and add a new digital 25" arcade monitor that directly hooks to a VGA cable off of the Arcade VGA card. This provides almost instant perfect game resolution/scaling with no effort on your part and gives an authentic pixel appearance versus a LCD monitor. This only requires you to buy a new plastic bezel ($20) and cut it to size to fit your cabinet and really polish off your monitor appearance.
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