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Complete Newbie looking for some info.

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nateious:

Hello all, I've been lurking around here for the past few weeks, but this is my first post (and it shall be a long one).

So between a friend giving me the idea when he talked about his plans to build his own cabinet, the panel at PAX East this year on building your own controller, and a general holy crap having one of these would be awesome, I've decided to build a mame cabinet.  In hindsight I probably should have posted this before I started ordering things (which I started last night)  ::) but it's a bit to late for that :)

I've decided to go with the UA2 cabinet kit and quad controller from mameroom, I read a handful of user reviews and everyone seemed fairly pleased with it.  I went with a kit because I have no real woodworking skills to speak of nor do I have access to many of the tools I'd need.

I've gone with a LCD monitor, from what I've read this is probably making some people cringe right now :P, believe me as a (primarily) PC gamer I just switched to an LCD a few years ago, (and mostly just  because I was sick of lugging my 21inch CRT to LAN partys :) ) but an arcade monitor was out of my price range and I was worried about the future, availability of parts and my ability to do any work on it if I needed to.  I also was thinking forward for newer games and I think newer games will look much nicer on a LCD than a low res CRT TV or arcade monitor. (If anyone is curious I went with a Hanns-G HZ281HPB, it was the largest (27.5) 16:10 (I hate 16:9 so very much, plus I'll have more vertical space with a 16:10) affordable monitor I could find that would fit in the UA2.

I've already got a PC to use, benefit of being a PC gamer, I've got all my old PCs laying around  ;D (I assume a AMD 3800+ x2 is sufficient for MAME, if not I've got an E6650 I can probably cannibalize)  Actually while I'm talking about PCs... Windows XP, XP x64, Vista (32 bit), 7 (64bit), linux?  I'm also probably going to want to go with some sort of front end but I've never really looked at these before so recommendations are welcome.

For a pc interface I got the i-pac4

For joysticks i got Sanwa Joystick JLF-TP-8YT-K from arcadespareparts, I have 2 questions about these.  I went with the ones with the metal mounting plate thing because I have no idea how these things mount to the control panel kit, from what I can tell this is removable if it needs to be but if anyone knows how this mounts please fill me in.  The 2nd question I had was these joysticks seem to have a 5 pin out, I assume that is ground, up, down, left and right does anyone know if the pins are labeled or the order?

For buttons I went with happ, but I'm in the middle of trying to cancel my order since I found the site I was going to get the spinner (groovygamegear) from has them much cheaper than happ sells them.  (Though I'm not sure if the player 1-4 buttons are happ (or if it matters) as they are not labeled as such)

That's the extent of what I've ordered so far.  The rest I haven't ordered yet but plan on doing so soon.

For a spinner / trackball I was looking at groovy game gears TurboTwist 2 and Groovy-TB 3" Trackball.  From what I gather, the trackball can plug into the Opti-Wiz, does anyone know if the spinner also can?  I assume you can get 1 opti-wiz and plug in both the trackball and the spinner at the same time?

For wire and those little connector things (does anyone know what these are actually called?) I figure I can just hit up the local Home Depot / Lowe's / hardware store.

Now the most important bit, am I missing anything?

drventure:

Welcome aboard.

Sounds like you've got a pretty good start on it.

For Front ends, there's a bunch to choose from. Check the Wiki on this board for lots of options. The most popular generally speaking are Mala, Hyperspin, Maximus Arcade, and atomic, but like I said, there are a lot, some free, some reasonably priced.

Finally, you're likely to want some good sound, easiest is a 2.1 set of PC speakers, but just about anything will work

Cynicaster:

Looks like you’ve done a good bit of up-front research, which is good. 

One thing that comes to mind regarding the Happ buttons, avoid the ones with vertically mounted microswitches like the bubonic plague. 

I completed my first build about a year ago and just finished an article in my blog (see sig) on the various important high-level design decisions that go into these projects, you might find it enlightening. 


nateious:

Oh I completely forgot to post about speakers.  I have an old set of Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 which I plan on using.  It is a 4.1 system so I can either just use the sub and 2 speakers, or (since I doubt any of the games I'd be playing have true surround sound :-P) I'll use all 4 and just have the "rears" act as a 2nd set of fronts.

@drventure, neat I didn't notice the wiki before, I'll take a look!

@Cynicaster, yep I read about the problems with the vertically mounted microswitches.  I will be getting the horizontal style :)

GregD:

I like the Arcade Prime buttons from Groovy.  They are similar to Happy but they have less travel.  The standard soft touch switches that GGG are very nice IMHO.

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