Nova BigScreen MAME cabinet

[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 



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




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.
 

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.

[skr]

[...]

Arcade machines are a cheap hobby relative to horses.
 

[...]

So true.
Horses are my wife's hobby - that been said I seldom have any discussions about the costs of my hobbies 

[Zebidee]

Horses are my wife's hobby - that been said I seldom have any discussions about the costs of my hobbies 

I had a girlfriend who was into horses. Like, waaaay too obsessively into them. Anyway, she'd always steal my nice warm coat when going to the horse paddocks   

Then I got giardia - a nasty gut parasite rare in humans, passed among animals by faecal-oral route. She'd gotten ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- on my coat and it made me sick, really sick   

Then my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend ripped my coat on a gate or fence or something   

I really miss that coat.

[skr]

Back on topic - rest assured that horses will have no further role than using a horse trailer for transportation of the cabinet

The marquee 1/2

After arrival of all the parts (panels, Pi, a decent power supply) I started hooking up the two 64x32 panel and got the Raspberry Pi ready (DietPi) and loaded it with the needed libraries (rpi-rgb-led-matrix, Python, etc). Sounded straight forward, but actually took quite some time to sort out dependencies and get the panels working.
In the end, after fiddling around with the python example scripts for showing images or animations (.gif) it worked really well.

In the meantime I found out that Pixelcade is selling the Artpacks (images/animations) separately, so I figured spending 20$ would be the easiest way to get my hands on some material to be shown on the panels.

I then tried the windows scripts provided by the guy who showed the alterntive on youtube (see above and a huge thanks for sharing this!), but unfortunately they did not work for my out of the box. Might be due to being a few years old and me using the latest mame build, but after changing the script a bit and fixing a bug I actually got what I was looking for: the panels showing an image (the marquee) with the samel filename as the game loaded in mame 

But. Having purchased the artpack I also had a lot of beautiful animations specific for a lot of games which had to be used somehow. I figured that it would be awesome if it could somehow be done that the marquee (image) is shown when starting the game and if there is an animation (or even more than one) that the image and the animation are shown alternating. To get this working meant I had to get into pyhton scripting - new territory...
It took some weeks of using the spare time in the evenings to figure it out, but now I have a script that, if being feeded with the game name looks if there is an image with that name, shows it, looks if there are animations with that name (xyz, xyz_01, xyz_02,...), choosed one randomly and shows it and this alternates between the image and the animation - and I am proud of it

I then created a "standard" animation that is shown when the cabinet is started up, or when there is now artwork available for the game.

And here a video of how all of this looks like (never mind the sound, just background noise... sorry):
https://youtube.com/shorts/D06dET3z80g

I will cover the installation in the cabinet in another post