Stargate Conversion

[kanthony]

I've wanted a MAME cabinet pretty much every since I first discovered MAME online around 1999. The first few cabinets I saw were pretty basic but the idea of having all my favorites with fairly authentic controls was too much to pass up. It took me over 10 years before I found a cabinet, the time and the space to actually make it come true. This seems to be a re-occurring story around here  I've bene lurking for a while but finally decided to share my build now that it's (nearly) complete.

I found a gutted and beat up Stargate cabinet locally for $50 that seemed like it would make a decent starting point. I had mulled over building my own cabinet from scratch but none of the plans I found had the proper look and I didn't want a massive cabinet anyway.



I was hesitant to MAME a perfectly good cabinet, but this one had been gutted of its controls and all electronics but its monitor. The monitor was non-functional and had some serious burn-in. The previous owner had started a conversion into a Williams Multigame (as evidenced by the mismatched marquee and bezel) but gave up as they already had a better donor cabinet with the proper art work.

I decided that any changes I would make to the cabinet would be easily reversable in case I ever wanted to bring this back to Stargate or I decided to get rid of the cabinet. I wasn't out to destroy, just temporarily give it a new lease on life. There have been some pretty hideous MAME-ification of some classics in much better shape than this (Stargate specifically), I had no interest to follow in those foot steps. Hopefully I haven't offended any of the purists still

Since the Stargate cabinet is pretty small and originally a single player, I certainly couldn't go any larger than two player. This was perfect though as I'm not a fan of really overly crowded massive control panels. I wasnt really interested in trackball or spinner games either, so button density wasn't a huge issue. The design ended up like this (taking the curve of the Williams panel into account):




The final design had a simple two player layout with six buttons in a pretty standard layout. I had thought about a more ergonomic Japanese style layout, but it just didn't look as nice on the panel. I had the curve of the panel to deal with, but it ended up giving me a great place to put my credit buttons to save a bit of space.

First steps were to tear the cabinet down as far as I could to be able to refinish it. Overall it was in pretty good shape with only a little bit of water damage at the bottom which is unfortunately pretty common. Given the amount of dirt and dust inside I'm not sure it had ever really been cleaned in its entire life though. I made a lot of new 8-legged friends cleaning this one out.



It took a few months but the eventual result was this:







I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 customized quite a bit to boot up quick and straight into Cabrio as the front end. I wrote a few scripts to automate the list generation so it's fairly automatic when a new ROM is dropped in for it to show up. Really happy with the front end, it looks good and is very simple and fast.

I still have some work to do on the back panels and I ordered some coin mechs to get all that up and working as the coin door is fine it just had the mechs removed. The marquee light needs to be toned down a lot as well as it's just too bright right now. Overall though, I'm really happy with it and the only problem I've had so far is dragging my 3 year old off of it after marathon TMNT and X-men sessions Teaching him young about the classics.

[eds1275]

It's looking good! Can you take a better pic or a screeny of the game select screen?

Have you are is there plans to wire up the coin door lights? Or make the coin door work for credits [even if it's just pushing in the reject button?]

[kanthony]

Youtube link to the front end in action while I was setting it up: http://youtu.be/rpMt2OkUMK8?hd=1 and a screenshot from a VNC session:



Coin door lights and mechanism are on the way, unfortunately the Canada Post strike/lockout isn't helping me get any of my toys here

[Drunkraccoons]

Wow i saw the stargate cabinet at the start and thought ouch 
when i saw the end product 
outstanding job good sir 
i love how the cp doesnt stick out from the cabinet and nice choice in simple but effective scheme of the control panel
i think i might use that rom selector for my cabinet it looks so clean 
great stuff your son enjoys it .i wish my dad showed me stuff like that as a kid 

[BobA]

Very clean looking cab.   Good choice for your conversion.   

[emphatic]

Looks great! 

[dexxy]

Well Done!  You've created a well polished machine!

[eds1275]

Yeah Canada Post will figure it out soon I imagine. They can keep my bills but there'll be hell to pay if I can't get my arcade parts!!!

[pcjason]

Firstly, very nice work on your machine!  The overall product looks very polished, especially with the custom artwork!

Now, I was wondering if you could share some details on the actual hardware and software setup you are using.  I ask because I am currently working on a similar system to be put into a Sega Astro City cabinet.  I currently have things semi-functional using an Athlon based system with onboard nvidia graphics running a slimmed down version of windows XP with the HyperSpin front end.  I'm not completely thrilled with the boot time, and since I am not using an ArcadeVGA card I am relying on other software to change the output frequency after I have booted into windows, which creates an ugly flickering effect.

I recently started toying with the idea of moving to linux, so I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a system and began to play with it.  So far, I have gotten CabrioFE compiled and running, as well as launching mame.  The issues that I am struggling with that I would appreciate your input on are:
   - How are you getting the wheel artwork?  Are you using the images provided by the HyperSpin project?
   - Are you using an ArcadeVGA card?  If not, I assume you are using custom modelines.  Do you mind sharing them?
   - How do you handle system shut down?  Do you need to "properly" shut down the system, or can it handle a hard power off at any time?  Do you mount the partition as read-only?
   - How fast is your boot time?  Is this just an ubuntu minimal install + X server (I don't believe there is any need for a window manager)?
   
Thanks!

[tjterrill]

I was also quite surprised at the end result.

Bravo!