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Lots of Beginner Questions-Japanese Parts-Eventual Bartop

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Turnarcades:

Any decent print shop or online printers (trawl ebay) should be able to print your marquee to a suitable resolution on a quality paper or proper light-allowing vinyl for a bit more. We use paper-based marquees and they light up just fine. As for control choices, decide first the feel you remember/prefer from back in the day; there is no right or wrong answer and it all depends on your play style. Personally I prefer stiffer, more precise sticks for most of my gaming needs.

BadMouth:

A WARNING ABOUT BARTOP MACHINES:

They take up space on your bar....
then you end up building a second bar just for machines.  :(




XCVG:

Okay, thanks. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and buy a proper marquee. Though I will try (and probably fail) to make my own first.


--- Quote from: BadMouth on March 25, 2010, 08:25:02 pm ---A WARNING ABOUT BARTOP MACHINES:

They take up space on your bar....
then you end up building a second bar just for machines.  :(




--- End quote ---

Well, it's not a literal bartop, as I have no bar, but I have plenty of counter and desk space to use up.

XCVG:

Double post, sorry. How frowned upon is that here?

Anyway, I have a computer. Kind of a piece of junk, it's a 1GHz PIII with either 256MB or 512MB or RAM, can't remember. Onboard graphics, but it has an AGP slot, I just have to find that Geforce FX5200. But the price was right; it was free. Apparently they had a whole bunch of them, they were going to just throw them out. ;D

But that's not why I'm posting. I have a crude Paint-drawing design. Most likely the CP part will have to be sort of splayed out to make room for the controls. I plan on using Sanwa JLF sticks (most popular, can't go wrong) and Sanwa OBSN-24 pushbuttons. For start/select buttons either SDM-18s from Sanwa or just Radioshack (technically The Source formerly by Circuity City, but everyone still calls it Radio Shack) buttons.

I also built a really ghetto coin mech when I was bored at school, in robotics. After trying to make sense of how actual coin acceptors work, I gave up and designed my own. The coin slot is sized to fit a quarter and nothing bigger. There is a second slot directly below which is sized for nickels. Dimes and probably pennies will drop through reliably but nickels have a 50/50 chance of giving you a credit. Did I mention that it sometimes jams? Usually I can clear it by slamming on it. Originally it had a microswitch, but the coin was too weak to push it. Then I tried two wires that rub against the coin before I had a brainstorm. So now it has an opto-interrupter thingy on it. And one of the wires came off, and my soldering iron is in a box somewhere. Oh well, I'll fix it Monday. And yes, this is because I am evil. There will be a coin 'reject' button beside it (which doesn't reject, in fact the mech eats your nickels and dimes without giving you credits) which will be wired in parallel. But I'm not going to tell anyone what it does. >:D

I don't know if there will be room for two or even one ghettomech like this though... :blah:

Turnarcades:

Being used to designing economy-sized cabs, the biggest tip I can offer anyone is to plan your internal space first as this will ultimately determine the outer shell dimensions - design it around hardware you have in your possession (not what you intend to buy) as if you have missed a key mounting consideration or something you will have a big, unusable lump of wood that won't fit what you need.

Coin mechs are possible, particularly this type of hack, but consider where the coins will end up and if it's really worth it. Bar-Tops are not really ideal candidates for full authenticity de to limitations like this. The more you cram in, the worse your airflow will be inside and higher the potential for snagged wires etc. You could consider relocating the credit and start buttons to the lower sides of the cabinet as we do, which opens up space on your panel and can be used as handy flipper buttons on pinball games:



Finally, don't worry about the PC spec - we are masters of eeking performance from lower-spec PC's, so as long as you use an older build of MAME (pre-0.106), the correct emulators for other platforms and the correct graphics options and OS tweaks, you will get just as good performance from that P3.


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