MAME Update

With some prodding from Angie, I made some more progress on the MAME cabinet today. (For some history on this subject you can check here.)

I've received all of the parts needed for the project, and made quie a bit of progress. I was able to get it far enough along that we were able to actually play it on my birthday. I spent quite a bit of time designing and crafting the new control panel. I set out from the beginning to do as little modification to that actual cabinet as possible. The control panel sits very nicely on top of the cabinet.





I will eventually cover it with black vinal, and finish building a box below it so that it looks a bit better. I really like how it turned out. I decided to do just 4 buttons for the 3rd and 4th players since there are no 4 player games that use more than 4 buttons. It got a bit of 4 player use during my birthday, and it felt pretty comfortable.

At first I had set up Ubuntu running AdvanceMame, but soon ran into problems getting the display correctly. After a lot of fuss, I found out about Lincade. It is a custom Linux distro that has all of the patched drivers and kernel needed to run the arcade monitor. It turned out to be a lifesaver, and works very well.

Today I finished mounting the computer inside the arcade cabinet. This should make Angie happy as there is no longer a computer chassis and monitor sitting in the living room :)

While I'm at it, I would like to highly recommend Ultimarc when ordering arcade parts. Even though they are located overseas, my order arrived in just a couple of days (probably faster than if I had ordered locally). They also promptly sent me some new switches after I noticed that a couple of switches that I had ordered had broken in shipping. I'm also using the I-PAC for the joystick and buttons, and it works flawlessly. If I were to do it over again, I would probably order the ArcadeVGA adapter to make the hook up to the monitor easier.

Overall I am very pleased with how it has turned out so far. When I have some more time I'll try to blog about some of the finer details. Now we just need to have another game night!