One of the big items I'd been deliberating over since the start was the choice of monitor. An arcade monitor would be great, but I had to GET one from somewhere, I had to hope that whatever I bought would actually fit, and then there's the many short and long term challenges that comes with using an arcade monitor compared a nice, easy, safe LCD panel. LCD wins on every front apart from picture which, of course, is what it's really all about.
Some time back I took a punt on a Jamma cabinet with the thinking that it would be an interesting side-project at some point to do something with and, most importantly, might give me an arcade monitor for my Ralph cabinet. The Jamma has sat in my garage over winter, and the garage is a fairly damp place although I've periodically run a dehumidifier. I did test the arcade monitor before winter but only re-tested it in the last couple of weeks when the weather warmed up. It works, although I haven't spent much time looking at the picture in detail, and there's a scratch on the glass that I probably can't do much about.
I'd taken some measurements from the monitor frame whilst it was in the old cabinet, which was imprecise because the metal bracket is angled etc., and come to the sad conclusion that it wouldn't fit. I was convinced enough that I'd started to de-case an old LCD panel with a view to using that. But I kept wondering about the arcade monitor and knew I wouldn't be able to rule it out until I'd given it a proper go.
Getting it out of the cabinet turned out to be a lot easier than I'd thought. I wasn't quite sure what kind of weight I was expecting (memories of lifting old, large, CRT TVs in the past) but it's not THAT big and the frame is mounted onto a sheet of MDF with nice grab handles on each side.
There's quite a bit of bend on the side of the MDF, but I'd need to re-make it anyway to fit the Nintendo cabinet, which is a couple of inches wider than the Jamma.
To try and figure out if it had a chance of fitting in the cabinet I grabbed the paper 1:1 plans and held the monitor on top. First the front got aligned with blocking of the shelf that would end up supporting it.
I could probably bring this forward a little bit if necessary. I also need to think about height, because I don't know how high the original monitor actually sits; there's danger of it being obscured by the bezel support. Best case the MDF would hang over the front of the shelf and the metal frame would sit ON the shelf, but I suspect it would need to sit a little bit higher. I'd also need something to secure the bottom of the frame so that the couldn't simply fall forwards if the cabinet tilted.
Anyway, signs weren't good. It's hard to be accurate with this because it involves standing the monitor upright, and it doesn't naturally stand in this position. But even balancing the monitor in one hand whilst eyeballing the frame it was clear that it didn't fit.
I pretty much gave up at this point, and then it dawned on me that the frame shape is different at the top at the bottom of the monitor. Sure enough, turning the monitor the other way up looked a lot more positive.
I can work with that, even if it ends up needing a tiny bit of movement inside the cabinet. This is great news, and if anything terrible happens in the future then it wouldn't be a massive amount of work to downgrade to an LCD.
I think the MDF frame attached to the metal monitor frame is probably the easiest approach for mounting. At the bottom I've already got the shelf, as mentioned. I just need to think about what to do at the top for support. This is where an original cabinet would have bolts from the outside holding a bracket which takes a metal support bar, but if most of the weight is being held by the bottom shelf then the top support becomes more about just making sure the monitor is at right angles to the shelf (I ASSUME that's the correct angle) and so I'm thinking that an L-bracket at either side would do that and also let me secure the monitor in place. Thoughts welcome on that one if I've missed something.
That brings me onto the cabling side of things. I've got an isolation transformer in the original cabinet along with some frankly dubious wiring that I'd replace. I'm also amazed quite how thin the power wires going into the monitor are, but I can only hope that someone in the past knew what they were doing on that front. So I'll steal the necessary parts from the Jamma cab (I'll downgrade that to LCD and other modern innards at some point, and feel fairly guilt-free because it's already far from original) and sort out the wiring where it needs it. I just need to think about connecting the monitor to a PC. I'd rather not use a J-PAC here if I can avoid it because I'll be using a U-HID for controls and so the J-PAC would be just be for the monitor connection. I've got an old AMD 5450 1GB card. Is this a situation where I can use ATOM-15 to flash the card to protect the monitor during boot, and then use GroovyMAME with CRT Emudriver beyond that? If I can, then is it just a case of taking a VGA output from the card and figuring out the approrpriate wiring at the other end to connect to the monitor? If not, any pointers here would be appreciated.