My first attempt at a bartop

[jond]

Well i've been watching this page for a very long time and loved the projects that came out of this forum. All the great members and Knowledge from mountain man, boba's, BurgerKingDiamond, Bender and everyone else. Well what i want to make for my first project is a bartop based off of either donkey kong or ms pacman. Ive seen some fine examples on this forum. My question is i have a 15-21" crt monitor and i would like to use a 17 or 19" but will the bezel be in proportion to the rest of the cab i want it on the angle or close to the one of Ms Pacman. so far i have monitor many to choose from a 3.0 ghz pc a ipac usb controller interface with buttons and joysticks.

[BobA]

A 17 inch CRT is as large as I would go in a vertical bartop.  I will get very large and heavy with a 19 inch. The old CRTs are not wide like the new LCDs so your aspect ratio will be good in the vertical. Laying the CRT back for a ms pacman look in a bartop is a problem as you do not have the drop at the back to allow the back of the CRT to be properly angled.   You might get away with it if you have a short necked CRT monitor.  The safe thing to do is to measure measure and measure then layout your CRT placement on a outline of you cab to see what is required.  Most bartops are based on the monitor being using.  This is very important when a CRT is being used for the monitor.

[leapinlew]

If you built it with a 19", it would be the same as a full size arcade cabinet. If you look through my projects in my sig, you'll see I built a bartop Galaga cabinet which is the same shape as a Ms. Pacman. I used a 10" CRT and still couldn't angle the monitor any. Like BobA said - you just don't have the clearance.

[apfelanni]

13-14 inch max for a vertikal bartop setup . its huge !  larger screens require more depth and weight a ton . there is no benefit in using 17 or 19 inch crts . i once build a bartop with 17 inch horizontal eizo pc screen . i wouldnt do it again coz its way 2 massy .

[LeedsFan]

Don't be too worried about using a slightly larger screen. Just make sure that everything fits within the cabinet itself and that the controls will go in fine without anything snagging or making contact with other things they shouldn't be. You say you want to use a crt monitor which is fine... but you will have the problem that Leapinglew mentioned earlier. With a crt in a bartop you really are gonna have to allow the screen to be more vertical. The very laid back "Ms Pacman" setup isn't gonna fly with a crt in a bartop. I'd just stick to an lcd monitor, which in turn allows for a much slimmer design to the cabinet anyway.

Having said all that, a larger screen will of course look a bit odd in a bartop as it won't look to "scale". But with later versions of Mame there are slider options in the TAB menu where you can make the screen image smaller. You can even shift it around on the X and Y axis to make the image smack in the centre of your bezel.... yes the bezel you can put over your monitor to hide the edges so all you can see is the 10" or so image that matches perfectly to the scale of your cabinet.

The only problem I have found with the slider options is that you have to set them individually for each and every game. There is no global setting for all games. I remember one of the developers mentioning to me on this site that it could be an option for future Mame builds, but I have no idea if this was implemented or not.

[jond]

You guys are great yeah im gonna try and draw out the plans on a full size sheet of paper and i have a 15inch monitor i think i no i have a 17 and im gonna decase it andsee if i can fit it in if i have to i might just keep it vertical instead of on a angle i will be working on this this weekend. Thanks for all the help