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It's back again!
M.Lanza:
This is my 2nd 1/2 mame project. I didn't post my first project and 1/2 here,
but it just involved a generic jamma cab a pc and some hacked psx controllers.
The 1/2 part involved removing the pc and replacing it with an xbox with an
x-arcade encoder because mameox works really well with lightguns.
I was using a tv with s-video as a display and eventually grew dissatified with the
display quallity, so this cab was eventually scrapped.
My wife got this cab for me as a birthday present a couple of years ago.
It needed quite a bit of work and I really dislike wrastlin', so I started converting it
to a game that I would enjoy more and decided that I really couldn't go wrong with tetris.
I didn't take any pics of the inside of the cab when I got it, but the jamma harness was hacked
into the original M.A.C.H. 3 harness somehow and I didn't really know what was going on inside
the cabinet, so I removed everything and started from scratch.
I used Bob Roberts site quite a bit, first to rebuild the the electrohome g07 and remove the
tearing at the top right of the screen, then built the jamma harness and power circuit.
I ended up learning quite a bit.
The game I used was the original atari tetris which used omni-handed controls.
I would have had to have another metal cp made and I wasn't sure how to accomplish
that, so I just filled in all but one button hole per player.
The start button is mapped to the first action button, so I didn't see a need for a dedicated
start button.
I covered the control panel and the area under the marquee with a vinal (sp) that I got
from Happ along with some other parts I needed such as the power cord, ac line filter,
isolation transformer, jamma harness, joysticks, and buttons.
I replaced the dead marquee light with a under counter light I bought from walmart.
Here are the pics of the finished product (minus T-molding).
Since then, I replaced the happ supers with sanwa jlw's, bought a tetris plus board
and added dark blue t-molding.
Tetris plus needed a dedicated start button, so I knocked out a couple holes to put them.
I don't have any pics of that stuff, but it's redunant anyway, so i'll go on now to how I'm
currently molesting the cabinet.
So far I've decided on a vertical cabinet ( too late now) for golden age classics and
vertical shooters, mostly because by control panel is limited to 2 action buttons per
player which severly limits the amount of horizontial games I could play on it and
vertical games displayed on a 19" horizontial monitor is a travisty to all that is holy.
So far, I'm performing some modifications required to mount the monitor vertically in the cabinet.
I had to remove the shelf that the monitor sat on and cut out some of the wood sections
directly behind the monitor glass to get it to fit.
The monitor current sticks out about an inch beyond where the monitor glass will go
so I'll be cutting some shims / mounting brackets from a peice of oak plywood with
the band saw at work tonight on my lunch break.
I decided to use an xbox in my cabinet instead of a pc it's cheaper and easier to
work with since it natively sends out a 15khz signal.
I can prepare a stock xbox to work in my cabinet in a couple of hours in the
case of hardware failure.
I'm currently waiting on an adapter from ultmarc to connect the xbox to the monitor.
I dismantled it to solder in an external power switch operated from the controller interface.
I will be interfacing with the xbox using a good old controller hack.
I'm working on a really thin budget, so the ipac plus adapter plus cable was out of
the question. the last time I used an x-arcade interface and adapter with the xbox.
I had to severly modify the harness to work with my old cp and I don't feel like
going through that again.
I'll be using the street fighter 15th annaversary controllers as my interface.
I already had one laying around so I decased it and decided that it would work
well for the hack, so I ordered another from ebay.
The best thing about this controller is that all of the buttons are digital,
so it should be no different from a psx controller hack.
I'll be wiring these controllers to a DB25 adapter I have and mounting them inside
of a vhs cassette box.
That's all I got so far, I've got to work all weekend so I can't make any progress
untill monday.
I've also got an idea involving proximity switches, but it will be a while before
I can hash that into a testing stage.
M.Lanza:
I'm free of the burden of working ( for a couple of days ) so I've made some progress. ( not much )
I used a bandsaw at work to cut some spacers from plywood, but i've still got more cutting
to do on those with a jigsaw later.
I've also got a couple extruded aluminum bars that I thought would work well with mounting the monitor.
I removed the plastic that was attached to one of the aluminum beams, and was rewarded with 10
hex head bolts and mounting nuts.
The nuts slide into the beam, allowing me to attach things to it using the bolts.
After cutting down the beams so they could fit along the the width of the cabinet
I attached the beams to the monitor.
It turned out quite well, perfect really, better that I thought it would.
That's the extent of my progress on the monitor mounting.
I should have the monitor mounted by the end of the day.
I kind of sidetracked a little and decided to work on my proximity switch idea.
I've made good progress and discovered setbacks preventing me from moving foward with the idea.
I work at a plastic injection molding factory. One day at work, while I was cleaning a material vacume loader,
I touched one of the material level sensors and noticed that the vacume feeder would turn on if nothing was
touching it, but as soon as I touched it, the vacume feeder turned off.
I then thought that it would be cool to use somthing like that in a mame cabinet and this is what I came up with.
http://www.ifmefector.com/ifmus/web/dsfs!KI0203.html
It's a capacitive proxmity switch.
At $130.00 each, it seemed like quite a gamble to take on a theory, but I was able to get
a pair of them on ebay for about $40.00.
Quite a bit more reasonable, but I should have paid a little more attention before I bought them.
Here is a prototype I built of the switching mechanism.
The switch can operate using dc voltage, so I wired it up to a vibration motor from a
dual shock psx controller and a 9v ac adapter.
I've also posted a youtube vid showing it in action.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkVaGoYbynQ[/youtube]
The idea was that I could mount the switch behind the tinted monitor glass
making this switch completely hidden.
I could then touch the area of the glass with the switch behind it and it would send power
to the dc motor and the offset metal peice would activate the microswitch.
The microswitch would be connected to the remote power wire from the xbox
which would be connected to a smart strip causing the whole cab to power on.
You can see from the video that it isn't going to work that way wecause the
the capacitive proximity switch is a normally closed circuit.
I can still make this work by connecting the xbox's remote wire to the NC tab on the microswitch,
but that would mean that power would be constantly applied to the dc motor possibly causing
it to burn up or catch fire after an extended period of time.
It's nice to see that my idea worked. At least I know that it's plausable, but I either have to find
another dc current operated switch with a normally open circuit, or find some way to make this switch
do what I want some other way.
severdhed:
looks like an interesting project, keep us posted. does mame on the xbox support monitor rotation? it has been a while since i have used it, and i don't remember trying to rotate it. i may have to look into this for a future project. right now i have started on a gun cabinet, but it is just a playstation 2 with a few gun games...i was not aware that xbox mame worked well with lightguns, because that would be a much better option for me.
BASS!:
Wow now that is an idea for a button. Is it sensetive enough to where a good game of (insert 2p fighter) would cause your monitor to rotate on its own.
M.Lanza:
--- Quote from: severdhed on July 08, 2008, 03:33:37 pm ---looks like an interesting project, keep us posted. does mame on the xbox support monitor rotation? it has been a while since i have used it, and i don't remember trying to rotate it. i may have to look into this for a future project. right now i have started on a gun cabinet, but it is just a playstation 2 with a few gun games...i was not aware that xbox mame worked well with lightguns, because that would be a much better option for me.
--- End quote ---
The screen rotation settings are in the setup menu.
Well, the lightgun games that are emulated properly in that version of mame work really well.
There are games that work and some that dont, but i've played quite a bit of zero point, police trainer,
zombie raid, and lethal justice using the madcatz blaster.
I've thought about placing the guts of the madcatz gun into a real arcade lightgun shell but never qot around to it.
--- Quote from: uprightbass360 on July 08, 2008, 04:24:09 pm ---Wow now that is an idea for a button. Is it sensetive enough to where a good game of (insert 2p fighter) would cause your monitor to rotate on its own.
--- End quote ---
The monitor isn't going to rotate. I'm just placing it vertically in the cabinet.
The button is going to be used to power on/off the cabinet, though I may wire up another as an escape/exit switch.
I test mounted the monitor in the cabinet.
All I have to do is figure out a way to secure it in place, but I currently have other issues with the cabinet,
so it's a low priority right now.
I had to lay the cabinet on it's front in order to test mount the monitor without it falling back into the cab,
when I did that I got a refreshing look at the terrible shape the base of the cabinet is in, so I decided to do somthing about it.
It seems as though three of the cabinet's legs had broken off long ago, so the cabinet's side panels were it's
only means of support for quite a while which has caused irrepairable damage to the bottom of the cabinet.
It turns out that the cabinet's sides are made of some kind of material that resembles a stack of paper.
There is no way bondo is going to fix this, so i've started the process of covering it up.
The way the cabinet sat after it's feet were broken off caused some stress to the body and it's side panels
have started to split apart from eack other at the bottom, so I have to make sure that the cover up will also
renew the cabinets structural integrity in order to prevent further damage.
The only way I can think of describing what i'm doing is that i'm building a wood box around the base of the
the cabinet which will be secured to the cabinet's side panels and a basic frame at the bottom.
I've already started working on the frame which the cabinet is now sitting on.
I really wasn't planning on doing any cosmetic work on the cabinet,
but since i've already started improving it, I may as well make it look better.