Main Restorations Software Audio/Jukebox/MP3 Everything Else Buy/Sell/Trade
Project Announcements Monitor/Video GroovyMAME Merit/JVL Touchscreen Meet Up Retail Vendors
Driving & Racing Woodworking Software Support Forums Consoles Project Arcade Reviews
Automated Projects Artwork Frontend Support Forums Pinball Forum Discussion Old Boards
Raspberry Pi & Dev Board controls.dat Linux Miscellaneous Arcade Wiki Discussion Old Archives
Lightguns Arcade1Up Try the site in https mode Site News

Unread posts | New Replies | Recent posts | Rules | Chatroom | Wiki | File Repository | RSS | Submit news

  

Author Topic: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.  (Read 3081 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

zatrudeldenis

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2
  • Last login:May 18, 2018, 01:21:07 pm
  • I want to build my own arcade controls!
Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« on: May 12, 2018, 08:52:36 am »
Hey there.

I got this project I've put aside long enough. I bought a mame cabinet a few years ago running with hyperspin. The PC in there was quite slow and ended up frying.

Ive bought a good PC from my office. but I dont know much about setting up mame on it, I dont even know where to find mame or if there are alternatives to hyperspin which I foud a little clumsy. I'll have to synch the controls to the cabinet as well.

I guess the first step would be to get my PC ready. I already have a PC so I won't buy a retropie.

So, any advices on wich websites i should consult for starting me up?

Thanks a lot!

Iz

luizw81

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 115
  • Last login:December 05, 2022, 12:39:36 pm
  • I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.
Re: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« Reply #1 on: May 12, 2018, 05:25:16 pm »
The easiest option would be to pull your files off your old rig and dump them on your new one.

Was the hard drive fried in your old pc?

Sent from my SM-J320R4 using Tapatalk


proplayer77

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 166
  • Last login:November 09, 2019, 03:23:58 pm
  • I want to build my own arcade controls!
Re: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« Reply #2 on: May 13, 2018, 02:12:17 am »
Hi, just watch this video:




zatrudeldenis

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2
  • Last login:May 18, 2018, 01:21:07 pm
  • I want to build my own arcade controls!
Re: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« Reply #3 on: May 13, 2018, 10:20:31 am »
I tried to check it out but the wires connected to the old hard drive are not compatible to my new PC, I guess it was a really old one!



The easiest option would be to pull your files off your old rig and dump them on your new one.

Was the hard drive fried in your old pc?

Sent from my SM-J320R4 using Tapatalk

MacGyver

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 317
  • Last login:December 18, 2023, 12:49:00 am
    • Project Build
Re: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« Reply #4 on: May 13, 2018, 11:06:59 am »
It really depends on how nice your old Hyperspin install was. If it has complete artwork for all the games in it as well as video previews, then I would buy an https://www.amazon.com/SISUN-Docking-Station-Reader-Black/dp/B009F7TXMK/ (powered IDE dock) and retrieve all of it.  If it sucks or supports only 13 games then don't bother.

Down to the games, again, if it has 13, who cares about the old ones.  If it was decked out with a full set from the time and worked perfectly then you should go with the IDE dock and retrieve them. The ROMs are a legal grey area and you aren't going to be able to easily recreate what you had from scratch. There is also a matter of size, a current full MAME romset would most likely be in the 135gb range and again not really legal unless you own all of the cabinets. A fully supported Hyperspin install with no emulators or games can alone be 15gb made of tens of thousands of support and media files in very specific places, each of them put there by hand.

Long story short, it seems like you don't really have a lot of experience tracking all that stuff down and merging it altogether, so knowing what I know if I were you I would definitely copy the elements of your old install onto your new computer's hard drive.

You should know that you will not be able to pickup everything and just drop onto your new hardrive. You will have to figure out where your MAME files and folders exist as well as where your Hyperspin files and folders exist then copy just those to exactly where they existed in the old install. In other words, if those were in a folder on C: named "dougs stuff" then they need to be put in the exact named folder in the same place on your new one. If they existed on a second partition named E:, then you will need to resize and shrink your existing new drive to make room for the secondary drive and then create a secondary partition with the same letter E: and format it.  Then you can copy the old files to the exact same structure on it. If you try coping everything and drop it onto the new one, you will break the Windows install of your new computer.

Now if your old one booted quickly and straight to Hyperspin with no Windows branding logos and no action on your part, then you are going to need to do some work to get it back to that state. It will be easy to get Hyperspin to load automatically, it will be a whole other thing to keep the illusion of nothing but an arcade cabinet.

There is an option that you might have overlooked, using an adapter to install the old drive into the new box, if the old OS was Vista or newer it may just boot and then require you to provide a bunch of new drivers. If it's older (XP or older) it will require some work from a pretty savvy computer technician to boot to anything other than the Blue Screen of Death. Basically XP installs one singular "Hardware Abstraction Layer" file set based on what type of CPU hardware was there when it was installed, and it won't work with anything different. So if you go this route, ask the technician to manually extract and replace the old HAL files with the versions compatible with your new CPU architecture. It is possible, just complicated.

Good luck.

proplayer77

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 166
  • Last login:November 09, 2019, 03:23:58 pm
  • I want to build my own arcade controls!
Re: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« Reply #5 on: May 13, 2018, 12:38:17 pm »
Id go with a fresh start and learn along the way how its installed and works. - This way if you encounter problems you know better what you have installed and where to modify preferences etc.

Just my opinion ofc.

Im running Hyperspin and Rocketlauncher on this laptop just to test it (have worked fine, but had to study and ask some stuff before got it working well, and surely ill need help again with it) and now ive downloaded all the stuff (fresh version) to put on the full size cabin im making from scratch.

Hyperspin has very active forum too where you can ask stuff: http://hyperspin-fe.com/forums/ 


EMDB

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 865
  • Last login:September 05, 2023, 09:18:51 am
  • Project RetroCade
Re: Getting Ready to Change the PC on a Mame cabinet.
« Reply #6 on: May 13, 2018, 01:10:17 pm »
More important questions should be:

how are the controls interfacing with the old PC (e.g iPAC) and how is the TV connected (e.g. VGA, composite out).

I agree getting to know how MAME / Hyperspin need to be configured is also nice to know and if there are a lot of games with themes / screenshots / video previews on the old machine I would definitely safeguard those...