New project starting tomorrow.

[Brunnen-G]

Ok, I'm officially starting my first MAME cabinet tomorrow.  I'm buying a basically new Midway JAMMA+ cabinet with a game that I'm going to sell installed in it.

I'm going to leave the JAMMA harness intact and get a JPac to connect everything up as well as an Optipac.

I won two 3" Imperial trackballs on eBay and I'm going to use them in one of the control panels.

The plan for the cabinet is:  P3/933 with 384MB of RAM, running Windows XP.  Wireless networking with an 802.11b card to make updates easy.  I'm using the arcade monitor that came with the cabinet, and it's a 25" so rotation won't be necessary for vertical games.  There will be 3-4 hot swappable control panels.

I'll set up a site once work actually starts.

[eightbit]

Keep us appraised of your progress and we want pics!  

[Dave_K.]

I'm confused.  You are getting 2 trackballs, yet you want to keep the jamma interface and use a jpac?  

The NFL Bliz cab you are getting only has 3 buttons per player (plus start)....  So if you are going to mod the control panel with the trackballs, you might as well add more buttons.  Actually aren't you getting the 4-player blitz?  So you will probably end up remaking the entire top of the panel.  

So why do you still want to limit your inputs with Jamma inputs? (Jamma spec has a limit of 4 fire buttons per per player  http://www.gamesx.com/arcade/jamma.htm.) I only thought the jpac was for people who didn't want to mod their original jamma cabinets.  *shrug*

[Brunnen-G]

Mainly I want the JPac for turning off video to the monitor that it won't display correctly, and amplifying the video that it will.

I might add an Ipac along with it to give more leeway.

As far as remaking the panel, that's what I'm planning on doing.  3-4 hot swappable control panels.

[Brunnen-G]

Ok, I got a cabinet.  Not the one I was planning to though.

When I arrived to pick it up, the NFL/NBA game was randomly rebooting, and I also noticed the monitor had a very wavy appearance.

The Street Figher Alpha 3 cabinet that I had originally been considering was still there much to my surprise.  The person who was going to buy it had been unreachable for several days.  Since I had cash in my hands, they let it go.

For anyone considering one of the new Midway cabinets, let me warn you:  they are ungodly heavy.  And big.  It barely fit into the back of a Ford Windstar van with both rear seats removed.  And it wouldn't fit sitting on it's back either, only on it's side.

After a couple of hours and a couple of hernias, we got it into the back room of our house, and it's staying there.

www.alltel.net/~rdorsey/cab1.JPG  This is how it looked when I first got it.  I'd already started removing the paint from the front of the control panel.  

Turns out this was originally a Mortal Kombat 4 machine.  The side art is completely gone though.  I'm going to repaint them black and *maybe* get MK4 sideart, or MAME.   Not sure yet.  If I can find a cheap MK4 PCB, I might get it working too.

Anyway, got a nice, VERY well built cabinet, 25" standard resolution Neotek NT2515C monitor with no burn in, a CPS2 A board, SFA3 B board, JAMMA harness, 12 buttons, coin mechs (took about 2 minutes to convert them to accept quarters instead of tokens), power supply, and one good joystick and one nearly dead one.  All for $295.

First thing I'm going to do before attempting to put a MAME computer in there, is to fix the botched job that someone did wiring the extra buttons.  The volume control remote switches in the front are also not hooked up.

[madk]

If you wanna get rid of that marquee let me know.  E-mail is matthewkris@hotmail.com

Thanks,
madk