I got out my tools and took my 20″ monitor out of its case ready to be placed in my cabinet. By complete fluke the monitor had mounting lugs in the 4 corners and so was very easy to mount in a piece of 12mm plywood. I also mounted my ipac on the back of the button panel and wired it up to all the controls – this means that I have a nice tidy ps2 cable going to the computer. I can’t wait to start playing on this beast.

Shelled 20″ Monitor

The mess of wires

It’s In

After mounting the monitor in the cabinet, the speakers that came with it were distorting the image on the monitor so I’ll have to go out and buy some better shielded speakers.

I also hooked up the coin mechanism to the ipac – everything seems to be working so far.

Inititally i was going to use a modchipped xbox running MameOX but since I had just been gifted a computer that although a little light on power (533MHz Celeron, 64MB, 6GB) should be suitable for the job.

Cabinet #1

Cabinet #2

To save myself having to build a cabinet, I started looking on Trademe and in no time was the proud owner of a old retro style cabinet….. or two. The first cabinet looks great with its woodgrain vinyl, but will take a lot of effort to tidy up. The second cabinet is a lot newer and bigger, but inclucluded buttons, joysticks a coin mechanism and a pair of speakers. It was also in a 9/10 condition after 30 minutes of cleaning.

Instead of hacking a keyboard to make a keyboard encoder, I opted for the more professional option of an IPAC2 Interface from Ultimarc.

IPAC2

Huge monitor

I spent more time looking on trademe and got a bargain on a 20″ monitor.

I’m currently in the process of cleaning up the cabinet and waiting on parts to arrive.

Some of you may at this point be wondering what the heck is MAME?

MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, it basically will allow you to play arcade games on your computer. Old arcade games actually had a circuit board in them programmed to only run that one game. These games have been downloaded off the circuit boards and MAME actually emulates the hardware that was in the original Arcade machine. In 99% of cases, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the original and an emulated version of the same game.

More information on MAME can be found on the mame website.

Across the road from where I used to work is a burger bar (Burger Fuel). In there they have an original cocktail (sit down table) cabinet of Galaga. It didn’t take long before I knew I had to have one of these in my own home.

I decided that I wanted to build a cabinet to fit a computer and mame setup in. I needed to make a cabinet, get buttons, joysticks, a computer, a monitor and a few other bits and pieces.

This is a basic and unstructured diary of how it is all progressing. Hopefully someone will understand it. I’ll try to update it weekly with my progress.