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I've Decided on SpyStyle's DOS CD, so What Hardware for Galaga Only Console?
pmc:
--- Quote from: SECONDandBOWERY on April 07, 2007, 05:22:44 am ---What is the cheapest way (and also what is the easiest way) to wire up a dedicated Galaga cabinet (2 way joystick, 1 fire button, 2 start buttons, 1 or 2 coin slots) and still have the game boot straight to Galaga upon bootup?
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Cool project.
There used to be a site that hosted PC floppy images that contained boot code and dedicated emulators. The idea is that you boot off the floppy and it immediately loads into a specific emulated game. Nothing is installed on a hard drive. There's a different floppy for each game.
It might get you three of your requirements: 1. fast/clean boot into specific classic game, 2. easy, and 3. cheap. You could use an old P1 or P2 board and you don't even need a hard drive. No need to mess with an operating system or MAME at all. Depending on the BIOS, you might have to do the two video cards trick to get a blank boot screen.
-pmc
NickG:
you can completely hide some mother board boot screens and post screens - those that display a bitmap instead of the boot and post screen. Some even have a built in bios flash utility for changing the bitmap so you don't have to hack your bios. One of the first motherboards I owned - FIC AZ11e - came with a boot image changing utility on the driver disk. Such a board could be had on the cheap these days and would still run Galaga. You would just change the boot/post bitmap image to black, and cover up your dos startup/batch with another black bitmap.
NoOne=NBA=:
The simplest solution would be to put two power buttons on the cabinet, and fire up the rest of the cab (monitor, marquee, coin lights, etc...) a few seconds after the computer.
You could build a circuit to do this automatically, but the expense wouldn't be worth it to me.
SithMaster:
http://retrograde.trustno1.org/index2.htm
but no coin functions. i too need to figure out how to get a straight boot since im working on a galaxian cab.
MaximRecoil:
--- Quote from: pmc on April 07, 2007, 01:32:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: SECONDandBOWERY on April 07, 2007, 05:22:44 am ---What is the cheapest way (and also what is the easiest way) to wire up a dedicated Galaga cabinet (2 way joystick, 1 fire button, 2 start buttons, 1 or 2 coin slots) and still have the game boot straight to Galaga upon bootup?
--- End quote ---
Cool project.
There used to be a site that hosted PC floppy images that contained boot code and dedicated emulators. The idea is that you boot off the floppy and it immediately loads into a specific emulated game. Nothing is installed on a hard drive. There's a different floppy for each game.
It might get you three of your requirements: 1. fast/clean boot into specific classic game, 2. easy, and 3. cheap. You could use an old P1 or P2 board and you don't even need a hard drive. No need to mess with an operating system or MAME at all. Depending on the BIOS, you might have to do the two video cards trick to get a blank boot screen.
-pmc
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Yeah, that is AMOAD (Arcade Machine On A Disk). Galaga is available as an AMOAD disk image as well. AMOAD is built from MAME source code, so the emulation should be fine. The OP only needs to do a Google search for AMOAD, it should be the first result.