SOLD: Super Pac-Man MAME Cabinet [US-VA-Richmond]

[jhanson]

I have a complete Super Pac-Man to MAME conversion/restoration for sale in the Richmond, VA area.  It has a brand new monitor, joystick, control panel overlay, light fixture, and t-molding installed.  The computer inside runs off a CompactFlash card, and is fanless (other than the power supply), so the cabinet is practically silent.  It can use a regular hard drive if you don't like the CompactFlash idea, if you prefer.  It can be powered on and off using a handy remote control, too.

I would like to get $500 for it, which is probably a little less than what I put into it.  Let me know if you're interested.

Here's a picture:



and a second one:

[jhanson]

The price is now $400.  I need to get this machine out of my way!

[MinerAl]

If I was anywhere near you it'd be mine by now.  Sorry man.

[XtraSmiley]

Wow, I can't believe you haven't sold this yet!  Did you end up painting it?  I'll give you your asking price, but I can't come get it.  Can you bring it up to me?  Did you end up getting a truck?

ARGGH

[jhanson]

Wow, I can't believe you haven't sold this yet!  Did you end up painting it?  I'll give you your asking price, but I can't come get it.  Can you bring it up to me?  Did you end up getting a truck?

Unfortunately, I do not have a truck, so I can't deliver. 

[jcroach]

Wow, that's a very clean conversion.  Do you have an 8-way or 4-way joystick in it? What front end are you using?  I'd love to hear more specifics about the compact flash hard drive.

But sorry, I'm in Indy with no truck.........

[Stobe]

On that note... What are the specs of the computer.  And what kind of monitor did you use?  (size, etc)

Thanks,
Stobe

[jhanson]

Wow, that's a very clean conversion.  Do you have an 8-way or 4-way joystick in it? What front end are you using?  I'd love to hear more specifics about the compact flash hard drive.

But sorry, I'm in Indy with no truck.........

It's one of those 4-way Ms. Pac-Man replacement sticks.  The front end is a custom one I whipped up.  It was designed to feel like it's straight out of the 80's, and has a Pac-Man themed slide show as a screen saver.

The compact flash drive is using an IDE to CF adapter.  Since CF cards have a limited number of writes allowed on them, I have it load everything into a RAM drive before anything runs.  That way it never has to write to the card.  You can usually find the adapters on ebay pretty cheap.

[jhanson]

On that note... What are the specs of the computer.  And what kind of monitor did you use?  (size, etc)

The computer is nothing special, since it's only running 4-way vertical games.  It's a P2-266 with 128 mb of RAM.  The monitor is one of the 19" VGA arcade monitors used in those Silverball touch screen games (without the touch screen component, of course).  It's one of those metal framed monitors that looks like a regular arcade monitor but has a VGA connector.  The picture is very sharp, and the monitor was brand new when I installed it (and has less than 10 hours of play on it now).

All of the artwork on the cabinet is original except for the control panel overlay, which is an authorized reproduction from Two-Bits.

[stellarola]

The price is now $400.  I need to get this machine out of my way!

Is it blocking your way?

[jhanson]

The price is now $400.  I need to get this machine out of my way!

Is it blocking your way?

Very much so.  I haven't been able to get out of my shed in weeks.  Thankfully, someone invented wireless, or else I wouldn't have been able to send out this distress call.

[jhanson]

OK, here we go.  The final offer.  For $400, not only will you get the fully-working Super Pac-Man cabinet, but I will throw in this empty bartop cabinet:



All of the metal on the bartop has been sanded for painting, including the coin door.  It should accomodate a 13" to 15" monitor.  It used to be a trivia game of some sort.

[AlexC]

Great deal. Wish you were in Texas.

[SirPeale]

This thread makes me a bit nervous.

I've been thinking about selling off one of my cabs for a while.  I've hesitated even POSTING it because of the issues jhanson is having selling his.  He's even in a place where there's more people to actually GET the cab.  I live in Vermont.

So if he can't sell this fine piece of eye-candy, what hope do I have of selling mine?

[jhanson]

This thread makes me a bit nervous.

I've been thinking about selling off one of my cabs for a while.  I've hesitated even POSTING it because of the issues jhanson is having selling his.  He's even in a place where there's more people to actually GET the cab.  I live in Vermont.

So if he can't sell this fine piece of eye-candy, what hope do I have of selling mine?

It's kind of disheartening, but there's not exactly a large Richmond contingent on this site.  Plus, Richmond is just far enough away from DC and such that I probably won't get any hits from that crowd.

[XtraSmiley]

Your freakin' killing me!  I will take it.

Please IM me your phone number and home address so we can set this up ASAP.  Hopefully today.  Thanks.

PS  Can you please also include the games this has on it?  Also, do the high scores save when the power is off?  Thanks.

[quarterback]

Your freakin' killing me!  I will take it.

Yeah!           

I'm glad somebody picked this up.  Not only because I think it's a great looking machine, but also cuz I'm hoping somebody reverse engineers the front end

[jhanson]

Your freakin' killing me!  I will take it.

Please IM me your phone number and home address so we can set this up ASAP.  Hopefully today.  Thanks.

PS  Can you please also include the games this has on it?  Also, do the high scores save when the power is off?  Thanks.

Check your PM!

On your question, the high scores currently do not save, but that's easily remedied.  It has the hiscore.dat and all that, but since I have it copy everything to memory first, it doesn't save on exit.  A quick edit could be done to skip the copying step, making it save the high scores and everything, but it comes at the expense of a shorter lifetime on the CompactFlash card.

[SirPeale]

On my next project I hope to utilize a CF card.  Is there a way to make the card read-only?

If I *don't* use hiscore.dat or cheat.dat or the like, it shouldn't write to the card, should it?

Oh yeah...nvram files...

Does it write to them each time?

Edit: yeah, it does.

[jhanson]

On my next project I hope to utilize a CF card.  Is there a way to make the card read-only?

If I *don't* use hiscore.dat or cheat.dat or the like, it shouldn't write to the card, should it?

Oh yeah...nvram files...

Does it write to them each time?

Edit: yeah, it does.

Yeah, that's why I went with the ram drive.  There's also the swap file used by the csdpmi stuff, which can be disabled or pointed at the ram drive.

[AlexC]

A "How to" write up would be nice  (fingers crossed)

[SirPeale]

How many writes does it take before it starts to affect the card?  I ask because we have a series of bartops that uses a CF card for storage, and I imagine over the years (it's at least fix years old) it'll see a lot of use.

[jhanson]

How many writes does it take before it starts to affect the card?  I ask because we have a series of bartops that uses a CF card for storage, and I imagine over the years (it's at least fix years old) it'll see a lot of use.

It depends on the card, but I most often hear something like 10 million writes.  I think that is for each sector on the CF card, and there is some software that is able to spread the writes across the card to make it wear evenly.  However, I might be wrong but I don't think just plugging it into an IDE adapter and letting MAME write to it would distribute the wear, so every time MAME writes to the high score files and such, it would be writing to the same spot on the card.  Since MAME doesn't seem to write to those files all that often, t would probably take many years before it actually caused an issue, but eventually that spot on the card would wear out.  If you allow the swap file to write to the card, it would write much more often.

[Stobe]

In all reality, if it takes a few years to be a problem, look at it this way...

What kind of CF card could you buy 3 years ago for $25 vs what kind of CF card you can buy today for $25?  Whatever card you put in there today would be almost worthless in 3 years anyhow.  If you upgrade your card every year or so, it would still be cheaper than pumping quarters into a machine, lol.

-Stobe

[jhanson]

In all reality, if it takes a few years to be a problem, look at it this way...

What kind of CF card could you buy 3 years ago for $25 vs what kind of CF card you can buy today for $25?  Whatever card you put in there today would be almost worthless in 3 years anyhow.  If you upgrade your card every year or so, it would still be cheaper than pumping quarters into a machine, lol.

-Stobe

It's not the cost.  It's the maintenance.  I'd rather build it and forget about it.  Imagine the card I can buy in 15 years when the card that's only being read from finally kicks the bucket!

[Stobe]

It's not the cost.  It's the maintenance.  I'd rather build it and forget about it.  Imagine the card I can buy in 15 years when the card that's only being read from finally kicks the bucket!

Boy!  I thought I was lazy!  If you can't copy the contents of one card to another every 5 years or so, you are the King of Lazy!  (j/k)

Kidding aside, I know what you mean.  But I can't seem to hold on to hardware long enough for it to fail.  I am a compulsive upgrader, lol.

-Stobe

BTW, I hope your sale goes through without a hitch.  I live about 40 miles from you and I don't like that thing being for sale so near me.  I'd have to stop reading the B/S/T boards, lol,

[SirPeale]

If it's going to be in the order of years, I'm not too worried about it then.  I'll likely design in a RAM drive and use that as swap space anyway, but not lock it completely down.

[jhanson]

XtraSmiley came by with a friend and picked up the cabinet this evening.  They had quite a long drive, but hopefully they're home safe and sound, enjoying the new cabinet right now as I type this.