New here, doing my first bartop.

[FirstTimer77]

Hey everyone been following the forum for a while and I'm going to start working on my first project here in a few weeks. It's going to be a bartop and I'm most likely going to be buying one of Harumans kits for the actual box. Either the widescreen or the Ult widescreen. I'm most likely going to have a million questions coming up but I have a couple right now I've been wondering about. If anyone could offer some advice I'd really appreciate it.

First I'm planning on building the PC from scratch and it'd be great if anyone here could look at my parts selection and tell me if they think there's anything off with my build. Like it being balanced/unbalanced.

Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz LGA 1150
ASRock H97M-ITX 1150 mITX Intel Motherboard
ASUS GeForce GTX 960 Overclocked 2GB GDDR5 PCI-e Video Card
Kingston HyperX Blue 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) CL 10
Corsair CX Series CX500M 500 Watt ATX Modular Power Supply
Storage will be a Samsung EVO SSD drive that I already have.

Also if anyone would know, should I be concerned at all about anything overheating in one of those kits? Are the vent holes in the kit good enough at venting the heat that I shouldn't worry about any kind of aftermarket coolers. I'm not planning on overclocking anything. (I know I chose the K series i5, there's a chance I might go with the next one down in the end)

Thanks for any help!

[HaRuMaN]

I have my Xbox 360 in my ultimate widescreen and you know how hot those get, I haven't had any issues.  If you desire, though, you could always attach an extra fan to the vent holes to push hot air out.

[FirstTimer77]

Hey thanks for the reply. Good to know a 360 can survive in there. Definitely gives me some reassurance.

[mrangrygrandpa]

I am also starting my first bartop build so I'll be excited to see your progress and hopefully pick up some pointers along the way. To keep my cost down, I went with a raspberry pi 2 running retropie. It boots straight into emulation station and seems to work pretty well so far. It doesn't look as awesome as the hyperspin interface, so I'm interested in your part cost if you are willing to share that info.


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[FirstTimer77]

Hey sure no problem. I have 2 builds in mind depending on what my budget looks like in a few weeks.

Build #1

Computer
Core i5 4690k 3.5ghz (3.9) - $199.99
ASRock mITX - $89.99
ASUS GTX 960 - $219.99
Corsair CX500M - $74.99
Kingston HyperX 8GB - $74.99
Samsung EVO 1TB SSD - $0.00 (already have it)

Build #2 (basically the same just different CPU/GPU)

Computer
Intel Core i3 4170 3.7ghz $99.99
ASRock mITX - $89.99
EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti Superclocked 2GB GDDR5 - $154.99
Corsair CX500M - $74.99
Kingston HyperX 8GB - $74.99
Samsung EVO 1TB SSD - $0.00 (already have it)

These prices are all from Microcenter so using pcpartspicker might result in cheaper prices. I also didn't choose a case because I plan to install the parts directly to the inside of the cab. I'm still working out the total price of the cab itself. Still trying to decide between Harumans widescreen/ultra widescreen. Also Haruman if you're reading this I read on a post somewhere that you do xbox 360 hacks for arcade controls. Could I order those from you too? I didn't see an option for it on your site.

Thanks

[JDFan]

IF you haven't ordered yet you might consider TKW4rr10r's off lease systems he is selling ( http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,133968.0.html ) he has a Modder system which would give you most of what you need (might want to add a dedicated GPU) for $125 shipped that would save you quite a bit on the cost for your build !

The Modder: This desktop is a step above the Basic.
-   i5 CPU (model 2500 – 3.3GHz)
-   4GB DDR3 RAM
-   All other specs similar to Basic model above

The name is in reference to the parts used in this model. While the parts in the basic are designed for the case it ships in, the Modder is built with using industry standard ATX parts. This means the mainboard has a standard ATX PSU connection and can be transferred to any standard PC case that supports a Mini-ATX board.  If you plan on adding a PCI-Express video card and eventually upgrading the PSU, this would be the model to look at.
Price will be $125 including shipping for 4 GB, an additional 4GB is $12.5 each. Again more than  half the price of what Newegg would charge.

[Miskatonic]

I suppose it depends what you're planning on playing but if you're just running mame stuff I would suggest that your system spec is "ridiculously OP" ;-)

Also, you say "I'm not planning on overclocking anything" but list your potential 960 as overclocked. So, not really sure what you mean but, yeah, seems like a very powerful build for a bunch of arcade games to me :-o

Bear in mind with widescreen and ultra widescreen that you'll be stretching most "classic" games to fit the resolution, too, unless you want to run with black bars/mega bezels...

[Miskatonic]

also, for controllers I would say these are the easiest boards for installing arcade controls into a pc based build. Plug and play, no soldering required or anything difficult, real simple. You just need the arcade buttons/microswitches/joysticks which are easy enough to get in many places.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Zero-Delay-USB-Encoder-PC-to-Joystick-2pin-Happ-Push-Button-For-Arcade-MAME-/191558261745?

Usually I hack joypads into cabinets and solder the earths and buttons all individually, it's time consuming though and at this price you don't really save much money (especially as you save so much time)

[FirstTimer77]

Hey thanks everyone for replying. I am planing on running more than mame. Some dolphin/pcsx2 and current steam games will all be on there which is why I need to build something with at least some decent specs (without going crazy). When I said I wouldn't be OCing anything I mostly meant OCing anything myself beyond whatever the stock settings are. When looking for GPUs it looks like a lot of those just come OCed out of the box so that's fine, I just won't be pushing it any further.

Also I was wondering about the xbox360 pad hacks because I've been reading on here that there are some real problems getting some steam games working right with ipacs and other encoders. I'm planning on having Ult Street Fighter 4, The King of Fighters 13, Mortal Kombat 9 (maybe 10) and Injustice on this cab and I haven't really seen anyone find a good way to make some of those work with an encoder. From what I've read it sounds like SF works fine now, and there's a work around for MK9 but I haven't seen anything on Kof and injustice seems like a lost cause with the menu buttons being unchangeable. If I can I'd rather just start off with controls I know will work with everything.

[Miskatonic]

the 360 pad is an utter ---tallywhacker--- to hack. It's really annoying. They've coated the buttons in some kind of anti-solder material (which, I suppose, probably is a property of whatever sealant they're using rather than a deliberate "anti-hack" measure) and they're a totally nippy prospect to hack. I would suggest perhaps buying a 3rd party 360 controller, I picked up a couple for about £5 each lately from hong kong and they mimic the 360 pad exactly (the computer thinks it IS a 360 pad). I would imagine these are probably easier inside to hack and may well not have this odd coating all over the board. However, if the board is the same layout, meh, it's still a very nippy layout to hack imo :-/ Perhaps, it's a long shot, you might be able to find blank boards someplace on the net - maybe ask a seller on alibaba or something about these. They must be someplace as factories fire them out inside pads in china so buying them before they're all wired up and connected would be a much smarter idea.

OR you could just use something like this which I've never used but according to some friends it works a charm...

http://www.x360ce.com/default.aspx

[HaRuMaN]

The MadCatz fightpad or brawlpad is your best choice to hack as a controller for the Xbox360.

[FirstTimer77]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. Just a quick question about the 360 pads. Since I don't know the first thing about soldering could I just buy a cheap 360 arcade controller like the ones Haruman suggested, rip it open, disconnect the wires from the actual joystick/buttons from the cheap arcade controller and reattach them to the joystick/buttons on my control panel? Is it that simple or am I missing something that would keep that from working?

Thanks again

[Miskatonic]

depends how they're mounted, a lot of cheaper joysticks can be "all in one" where the cable is kinda entombed inside the button at manufacturing stage. You can still cut the cable that goes to the buttons, though, but you'd either have to solder them to the microswitches on the buttons on your cp or use cable clips to attach to the cable then to the microswitches on your cp. If you know NOTHING about soldering then I would suggest going with this:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Zero-Delay-USB-Encoder-PC-to-Joystick-2pin-Happ-Push-Button-For-Arcade-MAME-/191558261745?

As you can attach everything from your cp to that (if you have LOADS of buttons you might need 2, check the listing for how many it supports). You can see from the pictures that all the wires are intact and ready to plug and play. I've used a couple of these recently and it does certainly save a lot of time compared to hacking joypads. Unless you're really good at soldering and have a secure mounting inside the machine for the hacked pad it's also a lot more durable (badly soldered joints can and do pop off from time to time if you've made a pigsty of things)

You can use this then use the program I mentioned above to make the pc think the data it's receiving is from a 360 pad.

I'm presuming you're not wanting an analogue joystick on your machine, right ? (being as the 360 pads have 2 analogue sticks I'm just wondering. That's harder to implement)

I pretty much gave up on trying to hack 360 pads for arcade boards etc and just used other controllers. I was buying repro snes pads (with usb connectors, not console connectors) from ebay for a while as they only cost like £1.50 (or did at the time) with free postage :-o Can't say fairer than that and you get a load of terminals to solder to, 4 way d-pad and 8 buttons is quite good for that price BUT of course you do have to know what you're doing with soldering. I never had an issue making these pads work ingame as anything I tried accepted them as default controllers and, of course, if you could remap ingame it was even more helpful. As with the software I posted above, there's a lot of external remapping programs for games these days that override the games settings (or inability to recognise your controller). Pinnacle game profiler is another one, but I believe you have to pay for that. there's also joy2key if you can remap the keys ingame then that can help, too.

[FirstTimer77]

Hey Miskatonic thanks for the suggestion. Those things you suggested do have a nice price and as long as they would work with the steam games I mentioned I would definitely get them. I'm assuming since the games would see it as a game controller and not a keyboard it should work.

Thanks again.

[Miskatonic]

no problem at all, my friend. Let us know how you get on but, yeah, I think that stuff should do exactly what you want and it's also probably the easiest and quickest way to reach your goal, too :-)