I made a lot more progress on the arcade cabinet over the past few weeks. To see updated pics you can start here:
http://www.jbullfrog.net/MAMEPics?page=1
I've run into a bit of a snag in terms of how expensive spray paint is. I was planning on spray painting the entire thing, but I found out last night that putting one coat of primer on one side panel took an entire can of primer spray paint (see here). I'm hoping this is just because primer is so thick and that paint will go further since it is so much thinner... we'll have to see.

I made some more progress on the MAME cabinet. I finished the shelf that the monitor (TV) will sit on. I think I'm going overkill as far as how much support I'm going to be giving the TV, but I'd rather go overkill than under. As always, pics of my progress so far can be found here:

http://www.jbullfrog.net/MAMEPics

Well, I'm finally beginning to work on my arcade cabinet project. I've posted some pictures of the hardware I've gotten so far and I will add more pictures as I make progress. Tonight I'm planning on starting to cut wood... I wanted to start last night, but we had a bunch of severe weather move through town and I spent the majority of the night in the basement with the animals.

I'm still not sure what kind of art I'm going to have on it, I wanted to go with a Frogger theme, but I'm not really into the art from the original frogger cabinet (shown on the previous link). I really like the art on games like Centipede and Galaga... This was the kind of arcade art I loved as a kid. It really piqued my imagination with video games: in the game Millipede you played a hunter in the forest trying to kill a giant millipede with your arrows... looking at the game's graphics you might not get all that. Looking at the cabinet's side art gave you a much deeper story regarding what was going on. I may just go with no art (white sides) until I can decide what I want to do.

You can look at my initial plans to get a good idea of the general shape of the cab; it will be a little over 30" wide. It will be a two player cab (two joysticks) and will also have a trackball for games like Centipede/Millipede and Golden Tee.

I've been thinking about doing this for a *long* time now: well over two years... I'm really excited to finally get going on this project :)

so my grand plans for getting mame working on the box I'll be using for the MAME cabinet ran into a bit of a snag... I got debian setup and working great but when it came to setting up X to work through the TV, things didn't go well. I hit a brick wall with setting up the video card drivers... You know you're trouble when the support threads for the card give their replies in haiku form while forum posts labeled "Hardware to avoid" include your video card.

It seems ATI can't cooperate with linux driver developers for TV-out due to some IP issue with Macromedia and DMCA restrictions. damnit. ATI does provide proprietary linux drivers for their newer cards, and they work (with some work); but this Radeon 7000 isn't exactly new. The only work around to getting X running using TV-out is to use the "vesa" driver. What sucks about this, is that this driver has basically no options available to it: getting mame to run fullscreen using hardware stretching is therefore a no-go using this card.

Not wanting to spend much on the hardware I bought this NVIDIA MX4000 for cheap. Hopefully this should work. I'll find out in a few days...

Also, wanted to point out that the MySetTopBox.tv forums are an excellent resource on getting Tv-out working with linux. very helpfull community.

Wanted to post two links, one of which I'll probably be referring to a lot later tonight...

• World’s Fastest Digital Camera - Seems that UW-Madison is in the digital camera business these days... if you're ever in the market for a $6 million dollar digital camera that is.
• My Settop Box - This is the homepage for the people behind the KnoppMyth Live CD. I won't be using KnoppMyth tonight, but their forums have a wealth of knowledge regarding getting TV-out working in Linux.

Kellie's having a "girl's night out" tonight and I volunteered to be the on-call sober cab. My goal tonight is to get linux running on the spare box I'll be using in the MAME cab, get X running on it with TV-out, get xmame working, and see how well the box plays a game of Vasara. If the game runs fine, I be using this box. If not, we'll have to see... I really don't want to have to buy a new machine. This is a pretty hefty project for tonight, but it should be fun...

For a picture "tour" of my project so far, go here. To start at the beginning, go here.

This page will keep track of progress on my MAME cabinet. The cab will be a two player cab and have a 3" trackball. I'm really not sure what kind of art I'd like the cabinet to have on it... I imagine it is going to have blank white sides for awhile...

On the software side, the cabinet will be running debian linux and will (more than likely) use the Wah!Cade frontend. The cabinet will also double as the jukebox for the basement. The jukebox will more than likely run from a different desktop on the same machine (so that it can be switched to easily from within a paused mame) and be run using an altered version of ampache.

The following is a list of items that will be used and their cost...

Item Description	Cost
Computer (old Gateway): processor: 400Mhz PII memory: 386MB RAMBUS brand hard drive: 14.5GB (to be upgraded) video card: ATI 7000 32MB (won't work) This might change soon... not sure if it's enough power...	free
New Video Card: Geforce MX4000 64MB	$27.50
Ultimarc order: 2 4-8 Way Mag-Stick Plus joysticks 20 buttons of various colors (red, green, blue, and black) I-PAC2 wiring and mounting kit	later...
DreamArcades order: Imperial 3" Trackball (includes 3 buttons) 3" Mounting Plate Hardware... 2 35' rolls of 3/4" t-molding	later...
Happs 27" monitor bezel	later...
27" Panasonic TV (not sure of model number...)	later...
more to come...

the computer was an old box my folks had sitting in their basement... never throw away computers! give them to your geek friends/relatives ;) I might be upgrading this in the near future as a buddy of mine gave me a few older boxes (though newer than this) that he had lying around his workplace...

All posts on this site relating to the cabinet should have the tag "mame cabinet". Here's a timeline of my progress so far (this might not be completely up to date):

• 6/7/2006 - Up till now, all work has been done on the software side of things. Today I finalized my plans and started cutting wood.
• 6/8/2006 - created a post over at the Build Your Own Arcade Controls forum that will keep track of my progress here.
• 6/13/2006 - finished the monitor shelf... check it out in the pics
• 7/7/2006 - finished the monitor stand supporting the monitor shelf. new pics here.
• more to come...

been looking through the madison craig's list for cheap 27" TVs. Last night I plugged the laptop (with MAME but without linux) into the TV in Jeff's room using the S-Video in (it's a 27"). I was a little worried about what the picture quality would be on the TV, but after playing a couple rounds of Marvel vs. Capcom, or should I say watching Jeff kick ass at Marvel vs. Capcom, I knew that a 27" TV using S-Video input would work great. Here are some TVs I've been looking at on craig's list...

• RCA 27-inch Stereo TV 27R410T
• APEX 27" TV

I really don't want to have to open the TV case up (very dangerous), and I think I'd have to if I bought the APEX above as it has the speakers on the side... then again, I guess I could build the TV's speakers into the design of the cab... something to think about. I'd like to buy a TV for the cab sometime before this weekend so that I can start measuring out dimensions and figure out how much MDF I'm going to need...

I've been getting the itch to build a MAME cabinet again... I was talking with my brother Jeff the other day about arcade games when I realized he hadn't seen some of the completely insane arcade games out there... Within a few minutes I had him hooked on the DonPachi, and now have plans to introduce him to Metal Slug and the rest of the Neo-Geo games (not to mention all the classics).

I currently have MAME installed on my laptop at home, but after talking with Jeff more I realized how much I really wanted to make this cabinet thing happen. Also, I recently got some pics from my buddy Bryce in OH. He just built his own MAME cab and it came together *very* nicely.

I'm pretty concerned about the monetary and time investment that will be needed for this project. Right now, I'm really only in the very early planning stages (which could go nowhere), but I wanted to post some links to things that have caught my eye so far...

• wah!cade - a configureable frontend port of the windows based MAMEWAH. This port uses the same configuration files as MAMEWAH which is itself very configurable.
• AdvanceMENU - I really like the looks of this one, though I couldn't ever get it to run (last year). Although this very well could have been due to my inability to get SDL to run correctly in debian...
• MAME Frontends - A fairly complete list of MAME frontends.
• Leon CP - A true work of geek art. Arcade control panel with graphic art based on the movie "Leon" ("The Professional" to us Americans).
• a very simple arcade cabinet - wanted to link this one as I really like it's simplicity... the wood finish was nice too, it would match our basement pretty good.
• Example Cabinets - very nice list of other people's MAME cabinets. Their hall of fame has a few cabinets that have become standard design templates people use to build their own cabinet... for example, on MAME cabinet sites you will frequently hear about the "Lusid" design (he has plans on his site).

I have no idea how long this is all going to take, with studying for exams it could take forever... In the meantime, I'll probably keep posting about what my current plans are... I pretty much have down what I'll be using for hardware, but I'll leave that for a later post.

If anyone out there has questions about any of this, feel free to leave a comment...