New cab for the back porch

[johnndeanna]

Hey all,

I wanted to take a moment to post some pics of my new cab. I decided to start a new cab after I dismantled the old crappy one that I first built. The new cab is a slim style that I wanted to a bit different than most slim cabs.

I spent some time today getting the side panels cut out and routed. I did one panel last week and I did a terrible job on it. Today I decided to make a template and use my router instead of the jigsaw from last week and I amazed at how much easier it is to use a router. Cuts like butter for sure but one HELL of a mess LOL I got my t-molding installed but in some places the slot is a bit wide so I'll have to glue it in once I paint.

Its going to be a 2-player cab with 3 buttons per side, a dedicated 4-way and a TT2 spinner and buttons at the top. Enjoy the pics.






John
Fort Mill, SC

[pbj]

Are you going to theme it after donkey kong?

[johnndeanna]

I haven't really decided on a theme yet. It is highly likely I am going to go with a solid color cab with no side graphics since during the winter this cab will reside in our living room so something to bold or crazy is really out of the question. We are almost done renovating out back patio due to a house fire and thought a new cab would be a good addition. My wife is painting a metal patio dining table and chairs a navy blue so maybe the same color on the cab may look good with the black t-molding.

I still may be able to convince my wife some side art may look good. I'm a retired USAF guy so something in that realm may work. Maybe a collage of USAF art and photos with a large ICBM up the rear edge?

John

[johnndeanna]

Work was pretty slow today so I took a half day vacation to work on the cab before I had sod delivered tomorrow. I figured I'd be too tired tomorrow after laying 3 pallets to work on it. Got the CP box made but need to add some filler and smooth things out a bit. Got a few more panels on and the area for the marquee framed in.

      





If I have time I am going to pick up a monitor tomorrow and get the bezel all layed out for cutting.

John

[johnndeanna]

I had a bit of free time today so I worked up a little bit on the CP overlay. I am going with a red tinted, outer space theme and will call the can the STARCADE. Below is a quick idea for the overlay. I am still working on the spinner area (top center and P1/P@ coin and start areas). I am using AutoCAD for this stuff since I do not have Photoshop. I probably need to get it so I can do a better job at this stuff.



Comments are appreciated.

[leapinlew]

I would use the same outlines that you use around the trackball and player controls for your admin buttons to explain what the buttons do.

[johnndeanna]

A little bit more done. Added a bit of transparency to the filled areas. About to head home for the night. Will probably work on this a bit more tomorrow. Any thoughts on how to label the spinner or should I just leave as is?



John

[leapinlew]

You just about got yourself a Knievel Control Panel!

 

[leapinlew]

Also, why is the artwork faded in the 2nd pic.

[yotsuya]

I'd put a slight stroke around your text to really make it pop.

[leapinlew]

Is there no slope in your control panel?

[johnndeanna]

Also, why is the artwork faded in the 2nd pic.

Not sure why it faded. The artwork was fine in PDF but faded when converted to an image.

Also, I'll be changing the CP box to include a slight slope. That box was just to get an idea of overall height without resorting to angled cuts.

Should I extend the Pl and P2 bubbles off the edge like the control bubbles?

[johnndeanna]

Well I got a b it more done last night. I decided to decase the old pc since I didn't want that beast sitting in the cab in case I wanted to move it. I mounted the motherboard directly to the base and will velcro the power supply and hard drive alongside. I also picked a monitor for the cab. Saw an advertisement on Craigslist for a 19" Dell for $20. I figured it was too good to be true but the monitor is like new. May not be as big as I'd like but it looks and plays well. I also got all the old rooms off the machine and loaded my top 30 and made sure they were all working in Maximus Arcade. I still need to load Daphne and get Dragons Lair and Space Ace installed.

Tomorrow I will prime and paint the CP and get ready to get everything installed. I decide to go just go with simple paint and no overlay. Since this will reside on the back porch I figured that was the best bet to keep it in good shape. Think kids getting out of the pool and wanting to play. Here's a couple pics of the progress.



John

[johnndeanna]

Got the monitor mounted today. Not too small as I thought it might be. Need to shim it back a bit to clear the bezel but that's easy enough. Computer is all set up and running now.

[Generic Eric]

Your cab is screaming to be a vert cab!

[johnndeanna]

I considered a vertical cab since 21 out of the 31 games scheduled to be on the cab are vertical. I'm still lacking a few games that need to be put on as soon, specifically:

Xevious
Raiden
Tempest
Dig Dug
Metal Slug 3 and 4
Dragon's Lair 1 and 2
Space Ace

I do have all of the required stuff for DL1 and 2 and SA, but need to find the roms that work for the others. I am using MAMEUI32 as my emulator and can't find roms that are working properly.

Anyway, only 5 of those games listed above are horizontal, however my favorite games are DL 1 and 2 and SA. Not sure how going vertical would affect the look of those 3 games specifically. I am also concerned at the size of the bezel going vertical. I will have less at top and bottom, but more on the sides, 6.25" actually. That seems to be a lot to me, but as this is only my second cab I can't say for sure. On the flip side, going vertical would really make the 21 games that are vertical shine, and the most played games will be those 21 vertical games, aside from Metal Slug since they are 2P cooperative.

I neither for nor against either option, I just want to make sure what I do looks OK. The wife if very happy with the overall look right now and don't want to screw that up. Any thoughts or opinions are welcome either way, especially related to how you think a specific option will look.

John

[pbj]

Slap a 32" flatscreen in there, and rotate it vertically.  Horizontal games rotated will be the same size as they would on your 19" LCD.

[johnndeanna]

Slap a 32" flatscreen in there, and rotate it vertically.  Horizontal games rotated will be the same size as they would on your 19" LCD.

Great in theory, not so good in budget. Hard to beat a $20 like new LCD

[Le Chuck]

Slap a 32" flatscreen in there, and rotate it vertically.  Horizontal games rotated will be the same size as they would on your 19" LCD.

This.  Wait it out, surf the craigs, you can probably find one for a hundred and it will be soooooo worth it.

[johnndeanna]

Slap a 32" flatscreen in there, and rotate it vertically.  Horizontal games rotated will be the same size as they would on your 19" LCD.

This.  Wait it out, surf the craigs, you can probably find one for a hundred and it will be soooooo worth it.

I'll look but not sure I want to try something that big. Actually, just checking my CAD drawings I can't even fit that size beast in there, even de-cased. Now granted it would look pretty cool, but going that route would also require me to purchase a new video card, which again is more cost. Other than the wood, glass and monitor, everything else is recycled from my old cab so cost right now sits less than $100 to get to this point. I'll be all in for less than $200 when it is finished, including paint. Hard to go wrong with that. Now perhaps a new cab after this one is finished may be in the cards? For this one through I am keeping costs down.

[Malenko]

not that itd make a huge difference, but why not a rotating monitor?

[yotsuya]

I considered a vertical cab since 21 out of the 31 games scheduled to be on the cab are vertical. I'm still lacking a few games that need to be put on as soon, specifically:

Xevious
Raiden
Tempest
Dig Dug
Metal Slug 3 and 4
Dragon's Lair 1 and 2
Space Ace

I do have all of the required stuff for DL1 and 2 and SA, but need to find the roms that work for the others. I am using MAMEUI32 as my emulator and can't find roms that are working properly.

John, I assume you have a Daphne setup to run DL1, DL2 and SA?

[johnndeanna]

@PBJ and Le Chuck

Dang it guys, the last thing I needed was inspiration LOL I actually just spent a few minutes browsing CL and there are a ton of 32" LCDs local to me ranging from $85 to $200 or more. I may have to seriously take a step back and re-think this smaller monitor. I think if I am going to do it now is the time before I get too deep into construction. I can still change a few things and all I have to do is fill a few screw holes. I'll see what I can find between now and Wednesday. After that point I need to get this thing complete. I'd like to have the whole thing functional within 2 weeks. My daughter is having a pool party for her softball team following our last tournament in a couple weeks and it would be great if I was done by that point.

@Malenko I don't want to do a rotating monitor. Less complexity for me to have to build in not to mention less complexity required for the younger ones to have to deal with, which is who this is mainly for anyway.

[johnndeanna]

I considered a vertical cab since 21 out of the 31 games scheduled to be on the cab are vertical. I'm still lacking a few games that need to be put on as soon, specifically:

Xevious
Raiden
Tempest
Dig Dug
Metal Slug 3 and 4
Dragon's Lair 1 and 2
Space Ace

I do have all of the required stuff for DL1 and 2 and SA, but need to find the roms that work for the others. I am using MAMEUI32 as my emulator and can't find roms that are working properly.

John, I assume you have a Daphne setup to run DL1, DL2 and SA?

I do, however, I am having difficulty getting them to run under Maximus Arcade. The run fine using Daphneloader so I know it is more about how to get MA set up correctly and how to get it to call Daphne correctly. A bit of time on the MA forums might help me with it.

[yotsuya]

I do, however, I am having difficulty getting them to run under Maximus Arcade. The run fine using Daphneloader so I know it is more about how to get MA set up correctly and how to get it to call Daphne correctly. A bit of time on the MA forums might help me with it.

Cool. Good luck with that. Those are some of my favorites and are must-haves as well. 

[JDFan]

For Xevious and Dig Dug and other Namco games it might be you're missing the Namco Zip files -- they relocated them out of the Rom packages and into seperate zips under Namco50.zip, Namco51.zip (52,53,54,62) and I know my 0.149 version was missing them until I downloaded them.

[johnndeanna]

@JDFan Those were the files I needed. I got all of them working except Tempest, but I believe I have the working copy on CD at home since at one point it worked in the old cab.

I am still having difficulties getting the Metal Slug games to work, but if I am not mistaken I believe those games have some CHDs associated with them and I need to find my CDs that contain those files.

[Malenko]

metal slug doesnt have CHDs. you do need the neogeo bios though

[johnndeanna]

Well after some prodding from you all and a bit of inspiration from Maximus' build, I have decide to forego the 19" LCD in favor of a 32" flat screen. Not that I wanted to spend the money but after seeing Maximus' images I decided that it is hard to pass up a change to go big before I go to far.

I am at the point where making some changes to the marquee area won't be hard. Going with the 32" I will have to relocate my speakers into the panel below the CP since there will be no more space above the screen to fit them in. I have a line on a Toshiba 32" of Craigslist only a few miles from my house for $95 so the price is great and the TV looks clean and functional. I'll have to work out the specifics of powering it up when the cab comes on since I have never used a TV in a cab before, but will likely just extend the power button wiring to the top of the cab along with the cab power so I can power them up from a single button.

My wife and daughter are going out of town for the next 6 days so my evenings and whole weekend will be free. I could finish this cab in those 6 days if I put my mind to it. Not sure how that will pan out but I'll be putting in some serious hours on this between now and Monday. I think the hardest part for me will be getting the TV to display correctly from the PC, but a bit of fiddling should get me there OK.

John

[johnndeanna]

Well every Craigslist TV I have found is already sold unless they are too far to make the trip worth it, so it looks like I'll be purchasing a new TV. Now to find one that is cheap enough to warrant the switch. Finding one with a VGA input at a low price point is hard so it looks like HDMI is the way to go. I thought that would mean getting a new video card as well but I remember that I just added a new card to my home PC a month ago that has HDMI out so that will go into the cab and the old card back in the house. There wasn't anything wrong with the old card, I just wanted something that would run Age of Empires 3 (my favorite RTS games) as the old card wasn't up to the task. That's OK though since I think I'd rather play the arcade versus that anyway :-)

At lunch I think I will take a drive over to Target an Best Buy and see what I can find around $175 or so. Wish me luck. Have I ever said I hate spending money!!!!

[pbj]

If you don't mind ordering online, this is the site I use to keep track of the decent sales...

http://dealnews.com/c159/Electronics/TVs/

[johnndeanna]

Okay, quick question for the PC savvy out there. At boot up the PC does its bios stuff but after the first 15 seconds or so it tells me to hit F1 to continue. I don't remember the exact wording but I always have to press F1 to continue booting up. Could it be that the battery on the motherboard is dead and the PC never retains the bios settings and so it is asking me to continue? I think that battery is probably 10 years old so it needs to be changed anyway, but wondered if that is the reason.

[JDFan]

Okay, quick question for the PC savvy out there. At boot up the PC does its bios stuff but after the first 15 seconds or so it tells me to hit F1 to continue. I don't remember the exact wording but I always have to press F1 to continue booting up. Could it be that the battery on the motherboard is dead and the PC never retains the bios settings and so it is asking me to continue? I think that battery is probably 10 years old so it needs to be changed anyway, but wondered if that is the reason.

Is this an older computer ?? --chances are you are talking about it encountering a floppy drive error - Older systems would fail to boot and bring up that error anytime the floppy drive errored out (ie. if you did not have a floppy drive installed on the system it would do that every time it tried to boot as it would look for the boot disk in the floppy drive and not be able to find one so would error and if the BIOS was not set to ignore that error would display the error on screen and wait for input to continue..

If this is the case what you need to do is go into the BIOS and in the main section or Boot section of the BIOS look for an option that says "HALT ON" and change it from "ALL ERRORS" to "ALL BUT DISK" or ALL  BUT DISK /KEYBOARD" and save the changes (Keyboard - will keep you fom having the same error if no keyboard is attached when booting and may cause problems later if you plan to not have a keyboard attached later) This tells the system to ignore that error and continue without prompting and waiting for the F1 keypress which should fix you up !

So probably not the CMOS battery at this point esp if it is keeping the correct date\time when booting - but if the battery is 10 years old (which I guess answers the original question about if it is an older system  ) a CMOS battery change wouldn't hurt !

[johnndeanna]

Yes, this is a fairly old computer. I'll try that this evening. I do not have a floppy installed but it used to do this even when one was installed. I am going to change out the battery and go into the BIOS and look for the options. I had changed the BIOS to only boot from the HDD and ignore other stuff but since the battery is probably dead it is likely it never really saved anything.

[johnndeanna]

Lunch time was a fairly productive one. Picked a new Samsung 32" TV over at Best Buy. Got a fairly good deal on it. Can't wait to get home this evening and see how it looks when it is all hooked up.

[Rick]

Lunch time was a fairly productive one. Picked a new Samsung 32" TV over at Best Buy. Got a fairly good deal on it. Can't wait to get home this evening and see how it looks when it is all hooked up.

I like my LCD. I'm not buying a 32" LCD.
I don't have the money. I'm not buying a 32" LCD.
I don't need you guys to inspire me! I'm not buying a 32" LCD.
You know what, I'm not buying a 32" LCD.

...

Hey guys, I just bought a 32" LCD!



Good move!

[johnndeanna]

Lunch time was a fairly productive one. Picked a new Samsung 32" TV over at Best Buy. Got a fairly good deal on it. Can't wait to get home this evening and see how it looks when it is all hooked up.

I like my LCD. I'm not buying a 32" LCD.
I don't have the money. I'm not buying a 32" LCD.
I don't need you guys to inspire me! I'm not buying a 32" LCD.
You know what, I'm not buying a 32" LCD.

...

Hey guys, I just bought a 32" LCD!



Good move!

Yah yah yah. Man I hate this place 

[Rick]

Yah yah yah. Man I hate this place 

Do you know how many people have been influenced by the knowledgeable majority to spend money they don't have on stuff they didn't know that they really, really wanted? (Hell, I'm one of them.)



Definitely a choice you're not going to regret!

[johnndeanna]

I know. I can already be sure that I will enjoy having this in the cab. I had a video I made the other evening on my phone and I just watched it. Pac Man seems so small on a 19" horizontal  monitor. Now it will be 15" wide and 20" tall, as will all of the vertical games, and of course DL 1&2 and SA will look spectacular. Its what the cab deserves and I'll just have to explain it to the wife LOL

[pbj]

MAME cabinets with ridiculously small monitors went out like 10 years ago, man.  Yes, we all slapped a 17" CRT in one and we all regret it.  You'll never regret going too big.  Ever.