| Main > Project Announcements |
| Nova BigScreen MAME cabinet |
| (1/4) > >> |
| skr:
Hello everyone, hope this is the right category for what I am up to - if not please feel free to move this thread! I guess it's a story not unheard of here: grown up in the 80s and 90s videogames have been part of my later childhood. The rare occassions when I had the opportunity to play real arcade cabinets, mostly during vacation in southern europe, have always been fascinating. So after fiddling around with emulators quite a lot in the early 2000s it has since been a dream to have an own arcade cabinet one day, preferably fitted with a MAME setup. Here we are, late April 2025, finally having the space for such a machine, an offer that did fit my wishes and using a weak moment of my wife - a Nova BigScreen has been bought ;D Fitted with a PS1 mod with Tekken3, a little rough around the egdes, but other than that quite what I was searching for. The plan was and is to restore the cabinet where needed, keep the monitor and overall electric setup and build a MAME machine out of it. I made good progress in the last fews months, but a few things are still to do. So if there is interest I am happy to share the steps so far with this project, as I was much enjoying reading through some of the topics here too :) |
| firedance:
Nice find, you'll have lots of fun modding it then enjoying it for years to come when it's done :) |
| skr:
Thanks! First thing I did after having the cabinet sitting at home was actually a lot of research and prepare myself for having to spend quite some money :) So I got into which desktop pc to be fitted in the cabinet and what additional hardware and software is needed to hook the arcade monitor up and to connect the controls. I finally ordered an i5-14400F setup in a case that fits the drawer of the cabinet (a nice feature by the way, as the PC is very easily accessible), a Ultimarc J-PAC board and an AMD ATI Radeon HD7450. While waiting for all that stuff to arrive I had a lot of reading to do on how to get the CRT-Emudriver working etc and also to e.g. think about what to do with the marquee. When I bought the cab a cheap Tekken 3 print on paper was fitted, which looked quite horrible (see above). While searching around I of course stumbled upon Pixelcade, which I liked a lot, but the price, especially with shipment to europe, was an instant no-go. I then also found a video from a guy who started a DIY alternative: - and decided that this was actually something I would enjoy to fiddle around with and would be worth to try make it work ;) So I also ordered the parts needed for the DIY build of the pixel marquee: 2x 64x32 LED matrix, Raspberry Pi 3B+ and an adafruit bonnet to connect the Pi and the matrices. Lots of parts and a lot to do :D First time hook-up of the PC to install CRT emudriver and the J-PAC - it's alive! |
| bobbyb13:
Excellent score! Arcade machines are a cheap hobby relative to horses. :laugh2: I love the deisgn of those cabinets. If I had seen the drawer style machines earlier in my building days I would have put together more of them. |
| Zebidee:
I also love the design simplicity. I have one myself, fitted with a vertical CRT for playing shmups mostly. Love the drawer. They are a little top-heavy with the CRT on top of that thin waist. Put your foot on the chrome kickplate to stabilise. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |