Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Getting the "Arcade" PC Upgraded
It's been a long time since I started the project, but I am determined to finish off the "Arcade Machine" project.

One of the reasons for the delay is that the PC destined to be the "heart" of the system died a horrible death. It was a failure with the motherboard -- all of its components were still in working order (most got swapped to other systems) and the thing would even "beep" when powered up. Bad. Of course it was past warranty so I needed to get a new motherboard.

So today I finally decided to splurge a bit and get it done. Gotta love it: for about a third of the price I paid for the original PC, I was able to buy a motherboard + CPU that is more than twice as fast as what had been in there. I had it done by a local vendor. I know, I know -- I swore off them previously, but the combination of cheap + local is a hard temptation to pass up, and was able to check out the quality of the motherboard online before buying it. It's CPU is an AMD Duron 1.2Ghz -- making it the second-fastest machine in the house after my 1.8Mhz Dell Dimension 4400 workstation. The MAME games should perform blazingly well on this machine -- though I have to admit to some guilt about not using its processing abilities to its utmost. I've already installed Seti@Home screensaver on it, and at some point I'll add a whopping big hard drive in order to make it a decent file server, but it still seems like it has processing power to spare. Oh well -- I'll just have to see that I give it enough work. ;-)