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Massive Newbie Questions!
Lilwolf:
Consider what your CRT will be (arcadeCRT/SVid TV/B-grade VGA/SVGA).... (quality wise, go from left to right.... easy of use, go right to left).
This should pick your video card.
if your going ArcadeCRT (and converting an existing cabinet)... And it's jamma (or not really)... the answers are all done for you (pretty much)
JPac (for encoder and video)... Trident VGA card or a G400.
If you are going svid TV...Go ATI and you wont go wrong... If you go geforce, you could get a good tv-out chip, but you wont know because there are so many manufacturers that each use different TV-out chips.
If your going b-grade or s vga... then go geforce. Best card out for the price in my mind. Go find a TNT or TNT2 card and you will be fine... Mame doesn't use the 3d stuff at all. It does (however) use the accelerated stuff for hardware stretching. But the TnT+ cards do a find job at that.
As for joysticks. Go supers or competitions. Supers are rounded inside where the competitions have a square (so you can feel the diagonals). I like competitions for fighting games myself... but to each their own.
Encoders... don't hack a keyboard! joysticks are better (no ghosting or matrix problems)... But everyone I've known to do that have bought an encoder after the fact. So go straight there if you can. Ipacs are great.... so are MKs (but not a great for 4player cabs now that the ipacs have a 58 key version). Hagstroms are good also, but more expensive.
Bob Ceccarelli:
Hey guys....
Got a few Sidewinders the other day. I took them apart and dying to tinker with 'em but my Happs buttons *still * havn't arrived. Oh well.
Also, I've pretty much decided on the following specs:
AMD Athlon 1.4 Combo Mobo ~$132
DDR 2100 RAM 256 MB ~$35
ATI Radeon 7000 (w/ TV out) ~$35
Built in sound card! Wahoo!
Anywho, sounds good for now... Can't wait to start building.
(3/4" woods works well I'd assume... right?)
BASSOFeeSH:
I absolutely HATED the Supers until I flipped the activator(actuator?) over. It was originally too sensitive & I was constantly hitting the corners by mistake. Flipping it to the smaller side made them 10x better IMHO.
I also have 1 of the ball-top j-sticks from Ultimarc. In 8-way mode you can feel the corners(which sounds like the competitions). I'm seriously considering replacing both of the supers with Competitions because I find it that much easier to pull off most moves(NOT full circle moves!!) with the corners.
And since I plan on building a 4-player cab when I find a house I can use the Supers for players 3 & 4.
Evil:
>> The lag I'm reffering to in the Mortal Kombat games is this: THe game starts fine, the menus are great, the character selection is wonderful, and the beginning of the fight is also fine.... but once the actions starts (ie the players jump into each other and start fighting) it starts to lag pretty bad and gets VERY jumpy, making it pretty unplayable.... <<
I think I know what your problem is. I had the *exact* same behavior with Asteroids (and no other game) on my system.
There is a configuration variable called 'sleep' that is by default enabled. I believe that when it's trying to save you CPU, its causing autoframeskip to set your framerate really low. Turn off sleep (and/or autoframeskip) and see if it helps.
-J
http://www.eternaldusk.com
neuromancer:
--- Quote ---"Gameports are a dying port, they'll be gone soon... USB has pretty much replaced it."
What does this have to do with anything, lol. I'll be putting a computer in the cab dedicated just for the MAME-CADE... meaning that eve if the "gameport dies" that won't effect it in the slightlest... it's not like I'll be continually updating and upgrading the CPU and be stuck without the gameport... ;)
--- End quote ---
Unless *your* gameport dies, like if your soundcard gives up the ghost like mine did last weekend.
Bob