The Old Grey Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be

Last night I made a last-minute trip to Radioshack in hopes of finding some crimp-on Insulated Quick Disconnects and wire so that I could rewire my panel (the right way). I checked their site for the location by me and called a bunch to see what time they closed... As it was busy every time I just drove there and got there at 8pm sharp, only to find that was when they closed. Despite the 3+ customers still inside, the door was locked and I was out of luck. I'll have to try again later :(

Since I couldn't really make any further progress on the electronics front, I decided to just kick back and play some games, only to find some interesting things

1.) My Celeron 500Mhz (512MB RAM, Win2K) does indeed hit a wall when it comes to being able to play some of the more modern games. I suspected this would be in the post-Street Fighter II era of games, but i was shocked to find that even much older games such as Galaga '88 and PacMania were slogging along at ~2-3 fps. I'm only to 1988 in my rom sorting process and so I haven't even gotten to 1991 when Street Fighter II came out. I will still give it a try but am not expecting much.

2.) I think I have a Merged Set of ROM's. I will need to test games out and deal with the ones that won't launch. If you don't know what a "Merged Set" is, here's a quick primer: Basically each game is loaded from a ROM file that was created by analyzing the data on the original game's circuit board. In MAME, a ROM is a zip file of game data files. Since many games have multiple clones which share some files, you can save space on your hard drive by "merging" the set, thereby making clones look to the original game ROM's ZIP file for game data that the clone does not need a second copy of.

The long & short of it is that when I was tossing games into my mame box, I think I've thrown some clones-only in for some games (since they worked on my Mac on which I was browsing the full set) but not thrown in the original game, resulting in some games that just won't launch at all. In general I was only throwing the original game in but for some such as Joust, it seemed that the only game that worked properly was one of the clones. I'll have to do a further cleaning of my system to analyze which games won't load, and see whether they do run on a different, faster box. Thankfully I've got an Athlon 2000+ XP Shuttle PC kicking around that I can plug my CP into to see whether I have any better luck on a faster winXP box.