Gutting a laptop for MAME

[morton]

Hi there,

I am in the planning stages of a build, and am not sure what I will be going with, but wonder about this Dell Studio 1558 (i3, 2.26ghz with 4gb RAM) laptop I have here. It was given to me by someone who had removed a bad hard drive or something and am unable to power it up without a power supply. I was hoping to see if it worked with something like Lakka, as I do not need an OS or Hard drive to run it.

Before wasting too much time with this, I am wondering if it is possible to:

- remove and run just the motherboard out of the case? Like seen at 9:25 of this video: https://youtu.be/p6SrUkNVqTs?t=9m25s
- power the board using a 12v supply? I hear that is what PC's use, and assume the 19.5v the factory power supply provided was due to the battery.

Any help along the way would be appreciated. The specs seem to indicate its a decent candidate for a MAME PC. Perhaps I am mistaken. Thanks in advance.

[Fishinfiend]

IDK.  A place that would probably be more helpful on running a laptop out of the case with possibly a different power supply would be the members of either http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ or http://www.overclock.net/ forums. I personally like overclock.net better but I think both are very good.

[Phreakwars]

Using just this???




You can do it, but you'll run into issues keeping the CPU/GPU cool if you don't have a fan running on the radiator. Especially if it's the model with the built in Radeon graphics. As for powering it, just get a power supply off of eBay. They're only 5 or 10 bucks brand new.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/351547128878

You don't really wanna try running it with just 12 volts, while it will work, you could be underpowering it and may experience crashing or simply shutting down once the CPU/GPU usage goes up.

 For hard drive, you can just use a USB stick and set it to boot from USB. You'll wanna keep the keyboard connected while setting it all up, but afterwards you can ditch the keyboard... better yet, replace it with something like a Logitech K400+ and don't worry about it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAB274YM8877

That's what I use on my son's cocktail cabinet. It allows me to do maintenance and what have you without having to open up the panel to access the jacks.

To secure the motherboard down, just use some Jamma Board PCB feet

https://paradisearcadeshop.com/fasteners/21-pcb-feet.html

My solution to address heat dissipation on that radiator would be to just use a modified slot cooling fan over it... Would actually probably cool better then the stock fan would if you do it right.

Here's one example, but I'm sure there are many other higher quality ones:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835200019

Try searching for this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=slot+fan&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1

All tallied, I'm guessing around $50 in parts will get you a good start.

EDIT: And there is 1 more thing, now that I'm thinking of it.. You'll need a way to power it on, so you will MAYBE have 2 options here.

One, solder into the power switch and run a lead to the side of the cabinet that way,

http://www.ebay.com/itm/232049348491

or second, and I'm not sure if the BIOS has this setting but I think it does... Just setup the BIOS to power on after power failure, then you'd only need to rig a simple switch on the power supply cord to power up. I've never personally tried this on a laptop, but in theory it should/could work.

[morton]

Thanks,

I like that this sounds possible. I am going to give it a shot I think...

I like the Bios Idea... was also considering using a pushbutton on the back to trigger the Laptop's power.

Great forum, and great suggestions. Much appreciated.

[Phreakwars]

Well give it a shot and post pictures on how it all turned out. I've never personally done a MAME configuration on a laptop, but for certain it has been done before. I know what I would "attempt" when setting it all up, but would rather see success that others have had first. I've considered the laptop route myself, ... cheap, portable, and as long as you know what to look for, integrated capabilities on the GPU's might not make your COD frames go up very high, but are most excellent for MAME and a vast majority... but not all, of the games.

But who are we kidding here?? We MAME cuz we like PACMAN, GALAGA, THE KONG SERIES... ETC.. You'll have more then enough power to run the games you actually WANT TO play.

OH YEAH, and if your gonna play with the hardware, play with the software. There are instructions around here on how to hide the OS.

Here's my attempt

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The inside guts

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