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      

[skr]

Marquee 2/2

After having the hard- and software side of the LED panels working the next step was fitting the panels to the cabinet.
While the width was no issue, the P4 panels are a bit too high to fit the marquee space in the cabinet without slight adaptation. But first things first - to fit the panels together and to screw them in the cabinet, I constructed and 3D-printed some parts:



Also a holder for the Pi was printed:


The needed space was removed from the board:


Panels fitted and to finish the look painted the board and the screws black:



After running the cabinet for a few hours the temperature of the Pi was a bit high, so I fitted heatsinks and printed a holder for a small fan to cool the Pi - no heat issue afterwards anymore



And finally a tinted acrylic glass was fitted to finish the marquee:


Done with this part

[Zebidee]

Sorry but for some reason, your dropbox images don't seem to be coming up properly in the thread. Can still see them if I open the image in a new tab though.

[skr]

Oh, that's a pity... Works flawless for me from my laptop or mobile though.
I will try to upload here again - it worked for the first post in this topic after resizing the images, but for the second post I could not get past the "security issue", no matter what I tried (resizing to different sizes, cropping) - so I gave up and used Dropbox...
If there are additional hints how to get image uploads here working - you're welcome to share them

[Zebidee]

What works for me is to crop and resize the images to 1080 max on a side, and save as JPG.

Then:

• Upload the images onto the "NOT A PROJECT" thread.
• Right-click and copy image link onto clipboard.
• Paste the link into your actual project thread.
• Highlight link and click on the INSERT IMAGE button (below the B for BOLD) on the new post toolbar to add IMG tags (or manually type in the tags).
• Image size can also be specified directly in the IMG tags.

As an example, an to demonstrate that you can do it with any pre-loaded images, below is an image uploaded by Ond. I've resized it here to appear small, specifying width=320 - height is automatically adjusted to match. To show it at full size, click on it.





"Quote" my post to see how it was done, then assume Ond's posture and relax......   

[skr]

Well, thanks for the explanation! I tried again and it seems that the errors were due to one specific image only... Took another one and now it worked again. Also thanks for the image size thing in the post itself - makes the posts cleaner

So I hope it's now working 

[skr]

Next up - the cabinet

Unfortunately the cabinet has seen some moisture during the past 40ish years, resulting in swelling (is that correct?) of some of the lower parts made of chipwood. The severest affected parts being the sides of the foot, those had to be replaced - a decent visual condition of the cabinet is essential to gain accepptance as a piece of furniture in the family :-P

Initial condition of the foot sidepanels:


A mate of mine knows a carpenter with a CNC mill, so I created the outline + screwholes in CAD and he manufactured the parts from laminated chipwood as the original ones. The only missing part was the countersunk part of the holes and the groove for the T-molding (salvaged from the original panels), I did those myself:



Face painted black (as the original panels) and T-molding mounted, finally attached:




The rest of the cabinet was already quite decent. A proper cleaning, new locks, some new screws, a missing service-door in the rear (found this one on ebay) and some touch-up + polishing of the metal parts and the appearance is great :-)

With this done electrics and ventilation have been adapted.
As written above I already installed the PC and the Pi for the marquee + an additional fan for the Pi. For the PC I also wanted to have an additional fan / ventilation, transporting heat out of the cabinet. So I printed a holder for a 80mm fan blowing down behind the PC:



Due to the installation of the PC and the Pi for the marquee I wanted to have separate switches to power  the PC, the Pi (or better the 5V power-supply for the Pi and the sound-amplifier to use the original speakers of the cabinet) and the cabinet itself. I integrated those switches in a 3D-printed coverplate for the hole in the back of the foot and combined it with an additional 80mm fan:



The 5V powersupply found its home in the back of the cabinet:


Wiring done:


Missing: software and an overhauled controlpanel :-)

 

[Zebidee]

Wow, that's some nice pro-looking work.

A suggestion: You could have a single momentary power button to turn the whole cab on or off. One button to rule them all.

All you need is a 5v relay, which are cheap. I've linked an example, but you can find them much cheaper than that too.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Relay-Module-Board-High-Trigger/dp/B08CC25N8D

The relay controls the main power, and use the PC to control the relay via 5v trigger (use molex or USB). Then all you need is a single momentary button to power the PC on/off (connect direct to motherboard via header pins). You can either make this button either discreet or obvious, but well away from the control panel.

Do power distribution as you prefer, a simple way is to connect the relay to an old power board/power strip.

I like to use integrate that setup with a PC-style female power input port, "IEC-320". One cable to rule them all, and this way you can remove and stash it for moving, storage etc. They come in different cab-friendly varieties, and those with a built-in fuse, switch and LED are nice. One switch to rule them all. Search for "iec-320 plug switch fuse".

Here's some I've done that a few years ago:

https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,166352.msg1759566.html#msg1759566


   


FYI - If you read through that thread you might see I later upgraded the relay to a beefier 40A one. I had ongoing power issues with that cab, but ultimately I found my problems were not related to the relay or power distribution setup, but to copper corrosion on the underside of the CRT TV chassis causing uneven power draw. Unfortunately the CRT PCB was no good - I had to replace the entire chassis, but kept the original tube. I failed to document this on the thread.

Some power options stuff is also covered in the BYOAC wiki

[skr]

Thanks for the suggestion and explanations - nice setup you did there!

Actually I already do have a switch replacing the power on / shutdown bottom of the PC hidden under the tray  The idea to use this to trigger the rest is great!

Having 3 separate switches at the back was however on purpose, that way I can only have the LED marquee turned on without the rest or the PC without the monitor when transferring files or doing maintenance via VPN.

[skr]

Been a while, here comes an update for the overhauled control panel 

Originally the BigScreen cabinet has 3 buttons, mine had a 4th added and placed kindof strange under the 2nd (see above). After playing around with the original setup that came with the cabinet it was soon clear that the layout of the buttons had to be updated. The mircroswitches did not work reliably, the joysticks also were quite worn and did not work as I would expect.
As stated I did not like the layout, so the complete control panel had to be replaced. Luckily for me the panel is made of sheet metal - much more my material than wood      

After some research I decided to go for Sanwa JLF sticks and short Happ style buttons (IL PSL). While drifting through the web I also came across the pro and cons of 8-way vs. 4-way controls, so in the end I decided to tackle this directly and also ordered the switchable 4-to-8-way restrictor by thundersticks.

With all the hardware available the next step was the design of the panel. The layout was soon decided on with help of this forum
A slightly adapted version of the Astro City layout from slagcoin.com reduced to 6 buttons per player, a slighty wider space between the sticks and the buttons plus 2 additional buttons for software-controls (and later also the double button for the 4/8-way switch in the middle top part):



A piece of ordinary sheet-metal steel in 1mm thickness already cut to the right width was the basis. I then 3D-printed templates for the layouts and visited a mate of mine who has all the right tools for bending and drilling:






Final raw panel vs. original one:



Dry-build:



The decision how to paint / cover the panel to make it look as close as possible to the original one then took quite some time...
I actually still did not quite figure out how the original one was done (spray-paint, powder-coat, foil - all did not quite fit the structure or surface), but I decided for fine structured powder coating and this turned out great:



With that done the last part was the blue design on the panel. As the design is quite easy to draw I thought it would be a good idea to create a vector-drawing and plot the design as a negative template with a special masking foil made for the purpose. I general a good idea and the design was spot-on:



But. The foil did not stick well enough on the structured powder-coated surface, so after an hour of fiddling around and a lot of cursing I had to scrap the foil and do the design manually...




Paint was then the last challenge as normal acrylic spray paint does not seem to be the best choice for powder coated surfaces. Second issue was to match the blue color to the rest of the cabinet and the gloss level to the powder coated surface. In the end I decided for 2K polyurethane paint and found a supplier for individually mixed spraycans not too far away and could find a pretty decent match gloss- and color-wise :-)



Painted:



Finished:





I really love how this turned out  Actually the blue color of the panel now even fits the blue of the cabinet better than the orginal panel 

Last thing to do: installation and wiring


And done: