Building a Mame Arcade Jukebox

[billblumjr]

I am in the process of putting together a Mame Arcade and Jukebox all in one, I have my motherboard and all the hook ups put aside to afix to a board..but have a few questions that i want to ask and didn't know where to ask since I am doing two systems into one..


1. The power supply for the motherboard. How would you attach this to the board,.. it has no screw holes to attach to the wood?

2. What software would you use for both I want the bootup to be able to select one of the two items Jukebox or Arcade.. also don't want the windows
xp to show on boot-up.. I have seen a couple things out there that I am sure will work but what should I use as a front end?

if anybody has any ideas I would sure like to hear them.  Thanks In Advance.

[mwong168]

1. The power supply for the motherboard. How would you attach this to the board,.. it has no screw holes to attach to the wood?

Pick up a roll of this pipe strapping for $3 from Home Depot



I use it to attach power supplies, hard drives and cd/dvd roms on wood before and work great.

[javeryh]

I use velcro.  Works great and it's easy to swap out if you have to.

[billblumjr]

Thanks guys I will will do that.. both ideas are great.. any ideas on what FE I should use for both so it will select either the Jukebox or the Arcade or even Windows (To load or change things)? So when my system starts up it auto boots to this.

[billblumjr]

I will also try and post pics as I go on this..

[rablack97]

If you have a home depot or lowes, go to the fencing section and look for bracings.  You should find some small L-Brackets about 1" wide with multiple screw holes.  I mounted my PS with those, they just so happened to line up exactly the stock screw holes in the PS and they are super strong.  The worked great with the HDD's and the DVD drive.

You can see one of them to the left of the DVD drive, there are 2 holding up the PS on the left side of it.



There's are tons of FE's out there to choose from.  Maximus Arcade, Mala, Hyperspin, GameEX etc.  What you could do is use one of the FE's to bring up your Jukebox software and when done ESC out of it and then choose an arcade option.  Once you choose your FE of preference the more you read on it the more you will figure out how to config it to do what you want.  My cab is a jukebox/arcade, but i just have it go to my Itunes, and then use my sony PSP as a remote to control it.  I can change the song, see my song list , change the volume, anywhere in the house.  I'll eventually get an ipod touch to do the same but for now the PSP is doing just fine.

Hiding windows on Boot up start here........http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Hiding_Windows

Then google a program called "instantsheller" or "BootXP"

The first will show you some tweeks the programs will help make it pretty for ya.

Also try this tutorial http://rahulhackingarticles.wetpaint.com/page/Speed+up+Booting+Xp+by+61+Times

My total bootup time is around 20 to 30 secs right now. Bios and all

Hope this helps

[billblumjr]

rablack97 thanks for the info I went out and bought some screws and the straps tonight. I will look into the FE and figure some other things out

[rablack97]

No problem, be careful with that strapping, looks sharp........

[billblumjr]

No prob I will be..

[Space Fractal]

This was why I created Arcade Music Box in some years ago, which was my first Jukebox software, which was designed with Mamewah in mind. Later I also did do a Jukebox/Frontend compo software named MultiFE (Its a jukebox software with inbuildt frontend).

But as rablack97 wrote, most FE'S can run regular PC applications, so you can just start the jukebox software as it was a emulator (typical using batch files), so you can use any jukebox software that can use arcade buttons to been launched from a frontend.

Just with that in mind, iTunes is not really a arcade friendly software with arcade buttons only.

[billblumjr]

Thanks Space Fractal I wasn't planning on using iTunes at all.. will look into what you said