Well, I got the cabinet home tonight and it is not the best cabinet conversion ever made by any stretch. Definitely not a restore candidate. It is a Taito cabinet with a tempered glass display cover. The monitor was burned in pretty badly and it had a bad PCB, so all of the guts have been removed prior to me bringing it home. The harness is kind of spooky. At the JAMMA connector there are some wires on the harness side that are cut at about 1" from the connector. All of the connections were already disconnected when I got there to pick it up, so I don't know where things are supposed top plug in. Some of the wires in other locations appear to have been cut as well. All I'm planning to use from the cabinet are the controls and the harness if it's still good.
After pulling the bezel out and the cardboard with the graphics, I noticed there was black paint on the underside of the glass. I'm not too sure why it would have ever been painted, but I scraped the paint and cleaned the glass and it looks much better now. It also appears to have quite a bit of monitor/TV room in there. The bezel is larger than the face of the 25" TV I'm thinking of cannibalizing for the project. I found a site that sells a converter box (
http://www.svideo.com/svideocoax.html) to go from S-Video to RF/Coax connector (which is all the TV has as an input). Has anyone ever used one of these or put a 25" TV in a cabinet this size? What all aside from creating a sturdy mounting setup needs to be considered when attempting this?
Since this harness is questionable (unless all of them are hacked), would it be a good idea to buy a new JAMMA harness from Ultimarc while getting the JPAC? The CP wires are all soldered onto the joysticks/buttons.
I've been able to get an XP box to run MAMAEWAH and MAME without issue. I've also got a Linux box to run Wah!Cade and SDLMAME with no issues. I'm thinking the converter box would take care of any video card driver, refresh rates, and resolution issues so whatever flavor of OS doesn't matter to me.
Suggestions/input appreciated. Below are some pics.








And the TV innerds...
