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First MAME Cab - Spider-Man (Updated: August 13, 2010)

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DillonFoulds:
Hey guys, I finally found a cab locally to work with. I've been looking in to constructing a MAME cabinet for 6 or 7 years now, and it's all started as of Friday, September 4th, 2009.

I picked up a Spider-Man, converted to NBA JAM Tournament Edition cab with a working power supply, monitor, coin door, and a lot of buttons and joysticks. The cab itself has already been repainted, as the previous owner was in the middle of converting it to a Track and Field machine. He had a friend airbrush some custom artwork on the sides, and he's rewired the Control Panel a bit as well. He got the game running, and then the game board fried. He brought in an electrician to look at the board, who decided it wasn't going to be an easy (possible) repair. The cabinet was then stored for a while, and now it's in my hands.

The control panel is mounted with 3 simple bolts, so I can make up a secondary panel if i want (2 player fighter panel, trackball/spinner panel, driving panel, etc.).

I'll be wiring it as follows: Encoder -> DB25 *2 -> Terminal Strips -> Disconnects -> Microswitches
Changed my mind, picked up an I-pac4, and decided to fore-go a trackball. Maybe in the future I'll make a trackball/spinner/2p board, but in the present I'm not concerned about it.

Friday, September 4th - Picked up the cab, dumped in kitchen. Upset girlfriend with giant arcade machine in the middle of the kitchen... no work tonight.

Saturday, September 5th - Cleaned up cabinet. Gutted C/P box. Organized some internal wiring. Peeled off Vinyl covering the C/P, and surprise! The original C/P artwork is still intact (albeit 3 holes around 4p joystick), no additional holes were made. Vacuumed cabinet, and cleaned out the inside. Tons of dust and a couple bugs :S

Sunday, September 6th - Started the planning phase. Working on C/P layouts. Went shopping for some parts, quick disconnects, wiring (i'll be using Cat5, 24 AWG for the C/P), cam locks for coin door and rear door.

Monday, September 7th - Got some PC hardware rounded up. Still need Ram and HDD though.

Wednesday, September 9th - Got PC all together, installed windows, started configuring MaLa.

Saturday, September 12th - Stripped the first side, to get a feel for the process. Looks easy enough. Weather looks like i won't get much chance this week to finish stripping it.

Sunday, September 13th - Hooked up PC to arcade monitor today. Picture was very dim, tried adjusting controls. Still not satified.

Wednesday, September 16th - Encoder Shipped Today!!!

Thursday, September 17th - Fired it up again, going crazy i haven't made enough (in my books) progress on this yet. Adjusted monitor a bit more, having some Red signal problems.

Saturday, September 19th - Brought monitor in to a tech, hopefully he can figure things out. More work on C/P. Mounted a terminal strip, and wired with DB25 cables in for a quick disconnect of the C/P.  
Edit: There was no problem with the reds, i was adjusting things wrong. Did replace a pot. on it that accounted for a bouncing screen problem though...

Tuesday, September 22nd - Finished Stripping the sides, started to prep them for primer.

Friday, September 25th - Keyboard encoder arrived today. Started wiring the control panel tonight. Can't believe how tedious it is to strip a wire on both ends, and crimp it. It took me almost half an hour to do the player 1 signal wires. Got in to a groove after that though, and did the remaining 3 in half an hour :P.

Saturday, September 26th - Finished wiring the control panel grounds tonight. It goes MUCH easier when you don't have to think about where you're wiring to, just daisy chaining wires and connectors...

Wednesday, September 30th - Started wiring up the keyboard encoder. I'm wiring a pair of DB25s here so that when it comes time to swap out control panels, all I have do is remove 3 bolts, disconnect the db25s, remove control panel, reverse the process.

Thursday, October 1st - Gutted the power supply, wired in the main power switch, and the external power source. Wired in a power bar. Also put a proper 115v plug on the Isolation Transformer and marquee. Put the control panel and the encoder in the computer tonight. Hooked the speakers (victims) up to the cab tonight. Played through Michael Jackson's Moonwalker with the girlfriend ;D. My fun was building it, her fun is playing, so it's only fair I let her have first pick! After all, this thing is STILL IN THE KITCHEN!!! and she's taking it pretty well. I'm a lucky guy!

First day of snow! The weather is officially no good for me to take the cab outside to sand and repaint it. Guess it's time to put it together for the winter... :(

Friday, October 2nd - (Re)Wired up the coin door. I've wired it with Cat5e, and left the end on. Inside the cabinet I've wired in a Cat5 jack. Nice and easy to disconnect. Picked up a sheet of black card to mask of the marquee (temp until i get some art for it). Wired in the speakers (I sacrificed a pair of USB powered speakers, so that there would be no issues with power sourcing. They're more than loud enough to power the 2 speakers in the cab.

Saturday, October 3rd - Found an issue last night with the 3rd player wiring keyboard encoder. I've posted a thread about it in the Software forum. LINK Could be a problem with the way mame handles input signals. I swapped a couple buttons (Current CP is only 3 buttons per player, so I stole button 4 on player 1 to fix my problem, could bite me in the ass down the road).

Monday, October 5th - Happy Birthday Andrea!

Tuesday, October 6th - Picked up new locks for the cabinet. Couldn't find any keyed alike :( Guess the back panel key won't match the front. Oh well.

Saturday, October 10th - Looks like Winter's here to stay... moved cabinet in to it's resting place for the winter. Got some play out of it tonight. Still need to set up the front-end. Over the next couple weeks I'll work on the (boring) software side of things. Accidentally broke a couple things in Windows, had to format mid play-time... grrrr... at least I had Guitar Hero to hold the friends over while I formatted. Note to self: Ghost my hard drive once completed...

Saturday, October 17th - Having more strange issues with the encoder. Now a couple buttons are stuck on. Did some troubleshooting and narrowed the problem down to the encoder itself. It's not a wiring issue (multimeter/continuity test reports things are fine), and it's not a windows issue (tried encoder on a couple different computers, buttons 13 and 14 are stuck on)...

Friday, October 23rd - Configured the windows user account a bit. Set up MaLa and some games lists. Configured MAME and MaLa to avoid using the mouse and keyboard as much as possible. Had to clean and replace some parts in a couple joysticks (old, but good joysticks).

Saturday, October 24th - Took my first power tool to the cabinet. Picked up an 1-1/8" spade bit a while ago that I've been dying to use. I mounted a power button up near the mains power switch.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - New parts arrived today! Also, the weather's cleared up. Hoping on the weekend to build up a new control panel!

Saturday, June 24th, 2010 - I did up a new control panel finally!

At this point the cabinet is fully playable. Here's my remaining to-do list.
- Cut control panel Plexiglass
- Sand, Bondo, Sand, Prime, Sand, Paint, (sand?), Paint
- Do up some artwork and have it printed
- Replace t-molding. Currently in rough shape, also it's of a plastic variety, could be higher quality for sure.
- Replace monitor shield. (Currently in decent shape, but new is better :))

saleem:
this thread is useless without pics.post some pics,this is where the fun is at,looking at what you got now,showing us your every steps and the end results.
 :)

drventure:
The quick disconnects will work fine, though you might need to double or triple over the wire (basically, strip off a lot more than normal, then just fold the wire back on itself before sticking it in the disconnect and crimping it down).

The 8 ways would probably be ok. I've got Magsticks for P3 and 4 and U360's for P1 and 2.

Honestly, I should have gone U360s for all players. That way, I could have used them easily for 2 player, 2 stick games. But the u360's rock!

As for coin button. There's another thread about coin mech usage, but the short of the story is, it sure makes a cab feel more "real" to have to plop or quarter (or token) in to play a game, then just reaching up and hitting a button. My cab has coin buttons. I'm kinda regretting it. But. That's just my 2c

Post pics dang it!  :cheers:

DillonFoulds:
Turning this in to a picture post.


Front Side


Left Side


Back Side


Right Side


Coin Mechs, the tan ones that are slightly harder to mod. Not sure if I'll fiddle with them much, as they accept common quarters.


Behind the marquee...


Here's a shot of the C/P latch, and also one of the 3 bolts that mounts the C/P box to the cab.


Here's the C/P opened up. You can see when it's opened you get full access to the cab, which i thought could come in handy.


And here's the backside of the CP, you can see some of the extra holes cut in here. Oddly enough, the holes by the red buttons were from the factory, and not from when the conversion was done. The only holes needed during the conversion are all around the green joysticks.


Here's the harness I'll be using to connect VGA to the RGB-HV signals


Transformer, my understanding is it steps down the 120v signal to 100v?


If I'm not mistaken, There's AC Power, D-Coil, then it goes Red, Green, Blue(brown wire), Ground, a few unused connections, then a Sync, wired in parallel with the opposing sync signal.


And finally here's some adjustment knobs on the monitor chassis. Note the model number is silkscreened here as well.


Here's a shot of the Track and field board, with a cabinet wiring harness connected to it (not JAMMA).

I got pics of pretty much the entire cab, request me if you want to see anything closer.

DillonFoulds:
So next step i think will be repainting the cabinet.

What i plan to do is remove all the t-molding, coin door, C/P, DOA game board, and then I'll have to decide if I'm going to strip it or sand it, or just cover the outside in a black vinyl. My concerns with the vinyl would be cost and coverage (i'll cut it 1/4" from the cabinet edges, and tuck it under t-molding).

The custom paint is airbrushing with a verathane (?) coat. I'm thinking i would like the end result more if i roughed up the current paint, bondo'ed, sanded, and then repainted. Would it be easier to sand something like this, or just strip it off with paint stripper? Also, if i'm sanding and repainting over the airbrushing, is it worth a coat of primer, or can i just start painting on the black directly over top? I'd be planning on 2 coats of black, for what it's worth.

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