The idea for this project started several years ago when my employer upgraded to widescreen monitors. I snagged a bunch of the LCDs they were discarding, kept several Dell 2007FP monitors and donated the rest to charity. The Dell 2007FP is a great monitor: 20” diagonal, 1600x1200, VGA, DVI-D, composite and S-Video inputs, plus an internal 4 port powered USB hub and a 12V jack. Add some powered speakers and use it for retro consoles. But I thought it would be ideal for vertical MAME.
However, I needed to make sure I learned from my previous unfinished MAME cabinet. With that project I spent $$ on maple plywood and parts to make the cabinet before I had worked out the guts and I never actually built the cabinet. (Something which my wife brings up any time I talk about starting a new project.) What I’ve learned for new projects is to defer spending money when possible and to stick to the critical path.
After thinking about and planning the project off and on, this year I decided to make the idea a reality. I’m using a Raspberry Pi Zero W which I previously purchased and had used with OSMC for playing DVD and TiVo rips. I’d also played a bit with emulation using Lakka. The only thing I needed to buy was a mini-HDMI to DVI-D cable from China via eBay (couple of bucks). I’m using a USB SNES controller and a USB headset for testing - both which I already had.
I started by wasting two weeks trying to get mame4all-pi working until I learned it doesn’t support screen rotation. (It also only does 44.1KHz audio and my USB headset only accepts 48KHz.) So I switched to lr_mame2000 (also based on MAME 0.37b5 but built on Libretto rather than hacks) on RetroPie 4.7.1 and was up and running (after configuring the system to make the USB headset “card 0” in ALSA). Currently I’m using EmulationStation (rotated) with the default theme, but I plan on changing to Attract-Mode with a custom theme once I determine what games will be installed.
With the base software figured out the next step was to determine which games are both playable and worth playing. But to do that I needed to somehow hold the monitor in the right orientation as there was no way to rotate the monitor on its stand (as far as I could determine). But I didn’t want to make the cabinet yet - not just to defer spending money but because I still needed to work out a bunch of details first. Fortunately I had a 1’x1’x2’ cardboard box left over from Christmas which could be sacrificed.
The cardboard “cabinet” worked well enough, but over time the monitor started to sink lower behind the “control panel”. So I started to think about making the actual cabinet, but I realized I still had a bunch of questions about the control panel - in particular whether having the control panel level with the bottom of the monitor would result in your hands obstructing your view. So I decided to just make something to hold the monitor.
The sides are a 1’x2’ shelf I had in my collection of scrap wood cut in half along a diagonal using a Skil-saw. I then used a mitre saw to chop off the top points & match the side of the bezel. I then used three pieces of IKEA wood (no idea what from, again from the scrap pile) which were the exact length I needed to make the horizontal braces. (In the final build I plan on using 1/2” dowels and drilling through the sides.) And the “T-molding” is some fabric hockey tape I had and thought would look cool.
One of the local ‘cade part shops is having a sale, so I’ve ordered a Sanwa joystick, 4 buttons (two each side as my wife is a southpaw) and Player 1 & 2 buttons along with an Xin-mo controller (yes I could wire everything directly to the RPi, but this is considerably easier and less permanent). Once those arrive I can mock up a temporary control panel.