arcade + jukebox + robot hologram dishwasher rant

[screaming]

  All the while I was building my first cabinet I was dreaming of the days when I would be able to load up a nostalgic game of Ms Pacman or Dig Dug.   I couldn;t wait for the day when I could go through every single board not only "free", but with some groovy classic Def Leppard or Bon Jovi jammin' in the background!

  Now that I have my cabinet and I've been working so hard to make those visions of hair-band euphoria a reality, I'm slowly realizing that a jukebox and an arcade are not really such a great thing to have in the same box. Not only will you not be able to control the songs in a fully integrated manner and still have a full-featured *ARCADE* front-end, but you also lose some of the other features that a standalone jukebox would offer.

  How about volume control? I'm constantly adjusting the sound for my MAME games. Every game, it seems, is different than the next when it comes to the audio output and having to adjust it in a user-friendly manner, like a simple volume control knob, is a necessity. However, if you had an integrated jukebox, you'd also be adjusting the volume for the song! I want to rock on, dammit!

  If there were really a need I'm sure someone could write a front end that would reliably be able to incorporate jukebox-like functionality.  Album views, track views, song information, album covers, playlists, random shuffle, etc, etc. are just a few of the (IMO) necessary features.  Not only that, but an even bigger issue would having to control all this WHILE playing a game in ANY emulator.

  Imagine starting a playlist full of awesome 80's tunes and then going on to find the game that perfectly matches your song (C+C Music Factory and Galaga anyone?). You start the game and very quickly realize that the game is WAY too loud. Okay, so you use your special administrative MAME keys and pause the game, then another key to go into the service menu and turn down the volume. Now use your special jukebox keys and your nifty jukebox-friendly front-end you go into it's service menu and raise the volume of the music. Now unpause the game and continue.  That's not something I want to go teaching every one of my guests how to do!

  Sure there are ways around some of these, and some of them are probably a fun project to do: Install two soundcards so you can get two separate outputs, pump it out to your home stereo over a wireless/FM box, etc. but as long as they rely on using your arcade frontend to control there will always be the inconvenience and clumsy control problem.

  An arcade + jukebox + robot hologram dishwasher is simply too much for one front-end to do. Use it as an excuse to build another box. Get a touch screen interface and install it somehow in your existing cabinet. Whatever else you have to do, just don't expect to get reliable and userfriendly results from one front-end that tries to do too much.

/steve

[Minwah]

I know I'm in the minority here, but I just don't get this arcade cab + jukebox thing.  Arcade machines are for games, why on earth would you want to play music on it?!?!

Don't get me wrong I absolutely *love* music, that's why I have a decent hifi system.  If I really wanted to listen to my music while playing games I'd switch my hifi on, but I find it annoying having music interfere with the games' music/sounds.

I also think jukeboxes in their own right are great, I'd even like one myself, but I'd rather build a separate one than incorporate one into my arcade cab.

I do quite like the ability to play tunes (I'm going to have arcade game music samples) in the FE, but not during gameplay...thus the musical part in MAMEWAH is just about limited to doing that

[NoBonus]

What I could never figure out is why you would want to combine a mame and mp3 pc into one unit.  Why not build a "totally bitchin'" jukebox PC OR buy an MP3 or MP3-cd player and hook it up to a stereo in a cool box.  I realize it doesn't bring the amount of difficulty, but it does allow for better control.  Hell, why not install a car stereo where your marquee would be in your cab?  You could just have a regular stereo and have the marquee flip down for access to it.  That should provide plenty of difficulty and return better results.

NoBonus

[patrickl]

I guess it's because not everyone has the desire to built multiple machines or stuff their house full with otherwise useless machines. The overlap between the machines is often just too great to justify the sacrifice.

For instance, one minute I want to play music while I play pool (or just in that part of my house) and another I want to play games. Actually, I might even like to watch some TV. I could fill a wall with stuff for all that OR I could just build one cab. Since I wont be doing all these things at the same time anyway, I opt for the latter.

I could also reverse the question. Why not just add a few proper speakers to the cab and make it usable as a jukebox?

[screaming]

I guess it's because not everyone has the desire to built multiple machines or stuff their house full with otherwise useless machines. The overlap between the machines is often just too great to justify the sacrifice.

  Is the only overlap in that they are both recreational?  I have a motorcycle yet I also have an arcade. They are both recreational. Should they both be the same machine?

For instance, one minute I want to play music while I play pool (or just in that part of my house) and another I want to play games. Actually, I might even like to watch some TV. I could fill a wall with stuff for all that OR I could just build one cab. Since I wont be doing all these things at the same time anyway, I opt for the latter.

  I admit that part of the reason for building my arcade cabinet was to entertain guests. Not a big part, but a part nonetheless.

  That said, I think it makes a certain amount of sense for some things to be integrated. Music coming out the same speakers as my TV, for example.  If I'm listening to music I'm certainly not listening to the television.

  The same TV I use for games can be the same TV I use for watching cable. If I'm playing a game, I'm certainly not watching TV (though, it is nice to have both since I might take a break during the pacman intermission scenes).

  One could make the argument that it's okay for an arcade cabinet to also play music (at the same time) because some people prefer thier tunes over the game audio. I can understand that, and I might even agree to a certain extent. However, there are way too many cases where it would be a lot more of a hassle to get it to work than to simply offload the music onto another output device.

I could also reverse the question. Why not just add a few proper speakers to the cab and make it usable as a jukebox?

  Speaking with regards to my personal entertainment system, I don't think I could even put enough speakers in my 2.5' wide cabinet that would make it sound anywhere near as good as my hifi system that takes up my whole living room.

  Load up a DVD full of MP3s, slap it in my DVD player and I'm GTG for a damn long time. I would get just about as much song order and playlist control doing this as I would thorugh an arcade front-end - with much better sound.

  One of the other problems is that having a fully integrated arcade front-end with "music support" limits you in that you can only do one or the other.   You can only play games *or* listen to music *or* watch TV *or* play movies.  You can't do any of them at the same time, otherwise you run into the aforementioned problems.  I'd almost rather have a $30 K-Mart tape deck sitting behind me playing cassette tapes while I'm playing my games than have it built into the cabinet and having only a front-end control it.

Rock on (just not on your arcade )
/steve

[patrickl]

Was there a point in there? I saw a lot of sentences, but I guess my limited working knowledge of english made me miss you train of thought (I'm not being sarcastic, I just couldn't understand the general idea of what you where trying to say)

Anyway, my cab will be in the part of my living room where the pool table is and I don't have a stereo there. If my cab can play some music I guess ... why not.

I have a (wireless) remote control for my PC so volume control and such will not really be an issue.

[vputz]

Multihead, my good man.  Pretty sure you could do this in Linux with no trouble; either get a second monitor or a second (PCI) vid card and two sound cards (onboard + SBLive or some such).  Direct the MAME games and jukebox to play through different sound devices so you could have independent control.  Pretty sure you could attach two keyboards so that one "head" would get input from one for MAME and the small screen can get input from the other.

Hmmm... actually there's probably a way to set up a virtual mixer so that you wouldn't need two sound cards and set up a separate script to monitor a USB input like a volume knob so you wouldn't need a separate screen.

Hmm, or a script which would monitor which MAME ROM was being run, so you could have playlists associated with different games; I bet that would work too.

Or--TOO cool, make a double-headed MAME box with two instances of MAME running simultaneously and communicating with one of the hacks people have done to allow multiplayer games running simultaneously on two monitors.  Even cooler if they were the joint games (T-Mek and such) where each person would ordinarily have a separate terminal anyway.

OR, a two-headed MAME box with a separate serial LCD which would display the jukebox information, controlled by a separate input device (mixer/shuttle-jog control) so you could have BOTH MAME screens playing a joint game simultaneously with a jukebox playing custom playlists based on the existing playing ROMs...

I wonder how many screens a Linux X server could support?  This could be the hydra of doom!  Two on MAME, one on the jukebox, one with TV, one with DVD... would be quite a cacaphony and you'd have to have a heckuva processor, but it'd be cool.  More efficient to have multiple boxes, I'd think, but that doesn't diminish the coolness of trying...

-->VPutz

[SirPeale]

It's not so much how many screens it could support, but how much load you're going to put on the processor.

MAME takes a *lot* of pony power.  Decoding MP3s would put a big cramp on that.

[paigeoliver]

A jukebox doesn't need to be LARGE, nor does it need a fast computer. My 486 laptop can play mp3s with no problems. So if you really want a separate jukebox then buy a used 14" monitor ($10 is about the right price for those), a used Pentium computer (once again $10), and make your jukebox barely larger than the monitor.