Street Fighter II CP J-PAC, SDLMAME, and Wah!Cade on Fedora 7

[rhuel]

I'll be picking up a Street Fighter II cabinet next week that has a "bad board". I don't know what board is bad. The words "bad board" are sharpied on the plexi.

I am new to this site and arcade machines, but have been reading a good bit and experimenting with some stuff. I considered building a cabinet from scratch, until I thought about getting a used/broken cabinet that had a good CP. SFII has two sticks and 16 buttons I believe. The one I'm getting is mostly complete aside from the missing coin door. For $100 I didn't see how I could go wrong. By time I bought new sticks, buttons and MDF and cut and assembled the whole thing, I'd have more than $100 in it not considering my time.

Now for the questions:

To use a J-PAC board, can I connect just the CP to it and run that to the PC or does the video need connected as well? I do not know if this display is any good and will be putting a CRT PC monitor in the bezel. Does the J-PAC need a molex power connector from the PC to power it? Or does it need power form the original power board?

I'm thinking I'll be using either Fedora 7 or 8, SDLMAME and Wah!cade for the front end. (unless someone has some other ideas...I'm all ears) I have it set up now on a laptop and it all seems to work pretty well aside from some roms not working. I could use XP and MAME32 also. I have that set up on a desktop and it also seems fine. I'll use whichever works the easiest. Does anyone have experience with doing a similar build using the original CP from a cabinet and scrapping the rest? Seems like it should work well enough.

Any and all thoughts & ideas appreciated.

Oh, BTW...thanks for having a good forum to research and ask all these questions.

[Kajoq]

The J-PAC gets power from the USB cable you attach to the computer.  Make sure you get some extra wire to wire buttons 4/5/6 to the JPAC, as the JPAC will only take buttons 1/2/3 from the jamma harness.
Buttons 4/5/6 are handled by the kick harness... and theres no where to plug one into the JPAC

[rhuel]

Have any suggestions for what version of MAME to run and what FE for a box with PIII 933MHz, 512RAM, 40GB HDD, GeForce 2 Pro/GTS 32MB card, with a Sound Blaster Live! ?

I saw some guys had Win9x boxes running MAME in DOS mode and thought I'd give that a shot to see which works best. Just setting this box up now.

I've been having a tough time getting a FE and MAME to work together on XP. I'm using GameEX for a FE on XP. It will update the game list, but will not launch any of the games.

Under Linux, I can get Wah!Cade and SDLMAME working together, but my concern is trying to get the Horiz sync down to 15.7 for the Arcade Monitor I'll be getting (if the arcade monitor even works).

If the Arcade monitor is shot, I can use the Linux box with a PC monitor and not worry about the horiz sync issues. If the monitor is still good, I'd like to use it.

Any idea what size arcade monitor is in a SFII cab?

Thanks again for any info. I'm a n00b at this and have spent many hours already and don't even have my cab home yet. (Thursday is pickup day)