My Other Obsession

[Ruts]

Car are an expensive hobby and once you have spent lots of $$ getting your hobby up to a useable standard you normally have to spend more $$ to keep it workable/running

 

My other choice for spending $$ on is my arcade cabinet.

 

I am slowly (very very slowly) gathering together all the bits for my arcade cabinet.

 

I have a full set of blueprints from MameRoom for the Ultimate II cabinet (see pic below)

 

I have all the software I need from Mame and a front end from mameWah

 

I have designed a custom 'skin' for mamewah to suit the cabinet design I have in mind

Note the number of playable games list at the bottom left 2900+!!!

 

Last weekend I put together the layout for my control panel (joysticks and buttons) just to see how it felt. I wanted to make sure there was enough room between the joystick and buttons to be comfortable, also that the buttons were comfortably space and aligned and that if two players were at the machine that there was enough room between the two sets of controls.

 

Being happy with the physical layout I then proceeded to make up some graphics to overlay the control panel with the same basic style as the 'skin' above.

 

Just so I had an idea of how this will look with buttons and joysticks on it I created a mockup so I could identify how crowded it would look and if too much image/detail was obscured.

 

 

 

So basically the cabinet will consist of the following parts:

 

º Cabinet (using 16mm MDF as per the blueprint and example images above)

º Control Panel (using an I-PAC keyboard encoder - allows the buttons to be wired into the computer via ps2 connection)

º Monitor (19in flat CRT - needs readjusting tho)

º PC (using a P3 with maybe 512mb ram and a spare 40gb hdd I have laying around)

º Coin Slots (yes it will be coin operated to get credits - currently bidding on ebay)

 

So ultimately when I have finished construction it should look something like this .....

 

[Ruts]

mmmm ROMS

 

regardless of the legality of ROMS (its a long protracted argument) anybody looking for a few roms for their favourite emulators should pop over to ROMNation.Net

[ca18rolla]

yeah my old ladies boyfriend has a mame pretty sick as you can get unlimited amounts of games. Plenty of fun! looking good though

[Trev]

Have you got this MAME setup:

 

http://chris.polymathic.net/cabinet/

[Ruts]

nah - my cabinet setup will be two piece sides - like the images at the top - although the Lucid template is pretty good its not what I wanted. I did in fact PAY for my blueprints/templates

[Trev]

Ok, i was thinking of making that mame cabinet but i dunno my computer owes me over 3k and it aint gettin anylower so i could always get the games for that

[Tiger]

I got shit loads of mames at home! I'd love to build up 4 cabinets for these particular games:

Mortal Kombat 2

Splatterhouse

Punisher

Ninja Spirit

 

Oh... and maybe Strip Poker! hahahaha

[beerhead]

that looks sweet :) One of my mates has 5 neogeo's and 3 table tops :S

[Ruts]

currently 2901 games will be in my mame cabinet - thinking about adding some Playstation ROMS as well - will need another harddrive for those.

 

Possibly later I will add a semi-accessible cd tray to play pc games on it too - or add yet another harddrive and use daemon tools to mount images of the cds

 

remember mame literally stands for MULTIPLE ARCADE Machine Emulator

[Ruts]

So some bits turned up in the mail today ...... (insert happy dance here) :P

 

 

So after some sitting and pondering; do i build the sides and base for my control panel or do i just jump in and wire it up

 

I jumped in and started wiring

 

 

 

Player 1 Controls

 

Its not as neat as I'd like but as Nick said ... "only I will know"

 

Having done side one (count the wires - friggin things) I realised it would make sense to wire player 2 in the same colours (it was only moments before that I had discovered both sets of wires were the same colours with one set having a black stripe.)

 

So here is everything (except coin slot/credit button) wired and kinda neat - still contemplating heat shrink on the cables - but as this panel is only temporary I'll wait for now.

 

Tomorrow its finish the timber assembly, add the credit buttons and strip ALL those wires to go into the keyboard encoder.

 

THEN I will test my panel on my fave game ......

 

cracked 100k using the keyboard so I should do significantly better with a fully working control panel !!!!!!

[Clown]

damnit, someone in vic do this so we can have a competition and drinks night!

[beerhead]

Ahh cool, it has an emu guts :P I wouldn't get anything done if that was in the living room.

[Ruts]

Finally finished the control panel today - yesterday I had to do family stuff (gahhhh)

 

So I finished building the box for the control panel then fitted the encoder into a useful and accessable position.

 

The challenge was to try and work out how to attache the circuitboard to timber - in the end I drilled some small holes and used spare mounting poles from my motherboard.

 

 

Then the challenge was to wire in all the switches - notice the 'cheat sheet' I created so I didnt have to trace any wires back. and the loom actually looks tidy-ish

 

 

Finally wired up player two and the two credit switches (below the main circuits on the back of the control box.

 

 

Just tested it - and it all works - every switch detects properly and is wired into the right position !!

 

Yay for me - now to fix my pc so I can get it all running together.

[Ruts]

Wooot!!

 

Bought an upgrade kit for me - and retired the old pc to the arcade box

 

quick swap of a few parts ....... (damn those bunny chairs are uncomfortable)

 

 

and the whole thing is ready to go

 

here it is being put through its paces by my girlfriend (she likes Galaga)

 

 

 

 

 

ps. having the control panel did improve my gyruss score ...... 109k up to 176k

[Ruts]

Now - the slow process of testing - gotta make sure the panel will hold up to the beating its copping at the moment.

 

 

Then some decent timber work - the rest of the cabinet !!

 

woot woot