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A Mame machine in an antique buffet - USB probs solved (I think!)
drventure:
Ok, One more post for the day.
Since I'm in a bit of limbo right now while I find the right screen for this thing, I decided to have a go at some front end design.
I first tried Hyperspin, but it's just a tad to "animated" for this cabinet, I think.
I tried atomicFE, but it just crashed on me constantly. Not saying it's bad, but I couldn't get it to work out of the box.
I looked briefly at maximus and GameEx but didn't like any of the sample layouts, none of them came close to what I was envisioning, so I'm assuming I couldn't either with them, but I could be wrong :)
Anyway, Mala seemed +highly+ recommended so I decided to give it shot.
Wow!
Very cool. There's a few things I'd like to see, like being able to display the history (or part of it) in text on the main screen, and a slightly different "clock-esque" spacing algo for the gamelist (you can see why from the screenshot), and better handling of scaling images (maybe it's just me, but I could not get images to scale consistently when in free scale mode), but those are all relatively minor things.
Here's a shot of my first draft of a layout for Mala.
The game list scrolls around the clock edge like you'd expect. Of course the snaps and cabinet pics are dynamic.
It's designed for 1920x1200 (I plan on running at this res on a 24" widescreen LCD), but the shot is shrunk down for file size.
Each of the History, Exit, game start, and menu screens also have similar themes.
The machine name isn't set in stone yet, but I am leaning toward
"The No18 Arqadium Engine"
Or just "No18 Arqadium" for short.
Why 18? It just has a steampunk/old railroad ring to it. This is definitely not my 18'th build!
If anyone has any suggestions, or thoughts, please let me know.
And if anyone's interested, the fonts are Peake, Acadian, and PCOrnaments. The clock is from a screensaver I found online, and the DaVinci-look drawing is via Google Images, searching for "steampunk" and spending WAY too much time browsing ::)
Lyellin:
Love that frontend.
I'm currently playing with Maximus right now, but MaLa keeps on looking interesting.
Nice cab so far!
drventure:
Thanks for the comment on the layout.
To be honest, I didn't even install Maximus. I just checked out the sample layouts on the site and none of them even came close to what I was looking for, so I didn't bother.
But it did look like it could do some nice tricks!
drventure:
Well, a little progress.
I've run a tad low on cash, so picking up a monitor or PC for my cabinet is out for the time being.
So, I decided to have a go at getting the Marquee started.
The basic idea is that it'll be all exposed wires, pipes, gears and nixie tubes.
BUT, 1) real nixies are $$$, 2) the only real nixies that do alpha characters are segmented (like the old LED calculators), and that just wouldn't look right.
So, I found a snap online where a guy had disassembled a nixie to get the numeric cathodes out, went through all my fonts (more than I care to think about) and found a pretty good match.
I ended up using Bauhaus
So I cut some pieces of EL Wire, bent it into the proper forms and wired it all up. Works great!
Now then, I just had to build a fake nixie.
I'd picked up some busted vacuum tubes on craigslist a while back, so I smashed one to make sure the things weren't going to explode on me (they don't).
So I clipped the pins off another, twisted the base off (they tend to come right off, though a few have been a challenge)
Then, I took a triangle file and scored all the way around the bottom of the tube. A couple knocks with a glass cutter's mallet and the bottom of the tube fell right off.
I fished out the guts, bent up some wire to look like all the other letters/numbers that are usually in a nixie (normal nixie tubes actually have a separate cathode for each numeral, you can see them all stacked up on top of each other when the thing is off, it's a very cool analog look.)
All nixies have a wire mesh that surrounds the tube on the inside (that's the anode), so I found some window screening, sprayed it nickel, cut a piece and wrapped the inner assembly in it. epoxied it all up, and, well, the pics are below.
You can see the font template in the background I used for bending the wire.
The dark pic is with the tube on with the lights dimmed.
That's the first letter.
Hopefully the rest will go faster!
Bender:
just wanted to reiterate how cool this is!
love the FE and light up letters BRILLIANT!
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