Hi there,
I've been reading these forums for a while, but just signed up. There's a great community here, and great advice - some of which I should have taken a while ago, some of which gets buried amongst the mass of opinions, and some of which I'm still choosing to ignore for now.
I decided to build a MAME cab a few months ago, and did lots of research here. Read lots about Frankenpanels, about CRTs vs LCDs, about joysticks and buttons.
Made some decisions:
- LCD for space reasons (and because the wife *might* allow a slim cab in the house if it looks "tasteful") - but a 4:3 21" LCD that would rotate between horizontal and vertical
- 2 player six button plus trackball - Ultra Stik 360, GoldLeaf pushbuttons, U-Trak trackball, all from, Ultimarc
Found OND's fantastic wiki and thread for Metropolis, and being a complete woodworking novice really appreciated all of the woodworking explanations.
And built the cabinet. And hated it. I just didn't like how it looked and how it felt. It wasn't the "classic" look and feel from my youth.
Some of this was because of the screen/bezel - the matching of the bezel to the game being played is a big part of the experience for me, and there's not enough space on a 21" LCD to have MAME show the bezel artwork with the game in the middle. So I took out the 21" LCD and put in a 40" LCD TV mounted vertically. That was much better - MAME displaying the bezel that matched the game, with the central play area the right kind of size in vertical games. Not so great in horizontal games, but using MAME to display the play area across the width of the (vertically mounted) screen, filling the space above and below with the top and bottom parts of the bezel artwork, was definitely better. The ability to display both bezel and game area at close to original size may be a reason to prefer an LCD over a CRT - don't know if I've seen this listed as a plus for big LCDs anywhere?
More of a problem was the positioning of the controls. Putting the trackball in the centre of the panel forces the other controls further away from the centre. I didn't realise how much this would affect the gameplay until I actually tried playing some of the 80s classic one player games. It felt odd. I should be standing right in the centre of the screen, but I was all the way over on the left edge of the cabinet in front of the player one controls.
And I also realised I didn't like the design of the cab. Some strange angles at the top of the cabinet (I had created a plan that was kind of a cross between OND's Metropolis and Koenig's Project MAME, but not in a good way). And I had the front glass mounted as far forward as possible with the LCD right behind it. This didn't recreate the "closed in" feeling of playing arcade games in the 80s; although this may not be a cabinet problem, but more that I used to play games in arcades, where the cabinets to your left and right helped create the "closed in" feeling. (But I absolutely don't have space for a row...).
All of this has caused me to now call my previously unnamed project "Project Scrapped", although perhaps I should call it "Project Prototype" because I've learned a lot more about what I want from a cabinet.
Anyway....
I've started this thread to document my new project, "Project Slimtendo".
Inspired by many of the Donkey Kong and other Nintendo cab recreations, in particular ChanceKJ's DK Ultimate thread and WYO's Fix It Felix & DK Pauline thread at KLOV, I'm building a Nintendo style MAME cab.
Well almost.
Because I'm now a fan of using a big LCD to show bezel artwork and game, and because I still don't have space or wife approval for a deep cab, my build is based on the Gaetan plans but 300mm less deep.
And because my woodworking skills aren't good, the cab is 600mm (plus 18mm sides) wide - as you can get 600mm wide MDF from Bunnings which won;t require so much cutting.
It'll have removable control panels, so I can get the right feel for one player games and also have a panel for two player games (mostly for 2 player fighting games for the kids). And later, maybe a panel for trackball games, and maybe a dedicated Defender panel.
And it'll be Nintendo blue with white t-molding. But I don't know about artwork, because I don't want physical bezel artwork if I'm using MAME to display bezel artwork, but I do want some artwork for the marquee and control panels. And I can't put full size Nintendo artwork on the sides because I've got 300mm less width on the sides. But I have some time to make those decisions while I make the cabinet.
I've started, got as far as priming - which is why I've got time to post while the paint dries. Photos coming soon when I work out how to post them.
Martin
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Topic: Project Slimtendo - scratch build (Read 17881 times)
