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.