Meatball's Cab - Part Duex

[MeatballB]

Ever since I was a kid the holy grail was to 'have an arcade machine at home'.  Growing up in the days that arcades were everywhere and spending an awful lot of my youth at them, I always wanted a machine to play at home.  About 5 years ago I started checking into it and digging into the Build your own Arcade scene and jump in head first.  At that time I build a great cabinet consisting of:

Ultimate Arcade II Cabinet
X Arcade Tank Stick / Trackball
X Arcade Side Art & Marquee
Phillips 27" TV
A PC running everything
 - MSI K9MM-V Motherboard
 - AMD Athlon X2 64 4000+ CPU
 - 2 GB RAM
 - WD 250 GB HD
 - Geforce 6600 GT w/S-Video Out (Which was feeding the TV)
 - Windows XP 32
 - Maximum Arcade FrontEnd
 - Multiple emulators including Arcade Games, Laserdisc Games, Sega Genesis and Atari 2600

After a month or so of pulling things together I had a pretty good cabinet that I had some fun with.  But I'll be honest, the machine has sat relatively dormant  for the past few years for a few reasons:

1) The machine is slow to start up and get going.
2) Maximum Arcade seemed to be having some issues on occasion and I'd have to mess with the controls or reboot.
3) And most importantly: The image on the Philips TV being fed by the S-Video out on the Geforce just didn't look that good.  Staring at the screen for more than 30 minutes would start to bug me.

I don't know what drew me back into looking at the cabinet again, but a few weeks ago I got the bug to see what I could do to improve the picture on that old TV and it's spun up a whole new project to revamp the old girl to something a bit more with the times.

[MeatballB]

So...I first went about seeing what I could do to improve the picture quality of that old Panasonic TV and quickly found out about a lot of new software and tools out that really can make things look great on a TV.  Not to mention a lot of new frontends that may improve on what I already had.  Relatively quickly I discovered that the old Panasonic had to go and I started a look out for a Sony Trinitron on the local Craigslist listings.

I knew the cabinet, side art, marquee and XArcade Tankstick/Trackball were going to roll over to the new machine.  I then started looking at how I could upgrade that old PC to do what some of the new frontends needed.  I had a spare SSD lying around and was hoping that alone would be enough, but the more I read and dug I began to see that the Athlon 4000+ was a bit old in the tooth and the 2 GB limit of RAM on that motherboard really was a problem.  Then if I was going to upgrade the CPU/Memory I needed a new motherboard, which means that AGP Geforce 6600 had to go.

I started to look at upgrading the computer from the ground up, saving only the case and the power supply.  I've since purchased and built a new PC with the following specs:

- Gigabyte B75M-D3H Mobo
- Intel Core i3-3240 (Dual Core 3.4Ghz)
- 8 GB Corsair DDR3
- WD 64 GB SSD
- Radeon x300 128MB GPU (Had this lying around, sounds like it'll fit the bill for what I need)
- Windows XP Pro x64

Definitely glad I went this route as this machine blows the old one out of the water.  I've yet to decide on what frontend to go with and will get to that in the near future, but in the meantime, I've been messing with TV's. 

From some great threads I've been reading, I knew I needed to get a Transcoder to go VGA out to Component and I ordered a Crescendo TC1500.  In the meantime I happened to come across a Sony Trinitron KV-27FS13 on Craigslist a couple of miles from my house and got it for $25.  Thought it wasn't all fun and joy, the case was just about 1" too wide to fit into the UAII cabinet.  After some thoughts on trying to trim the case down to size, I just decided to decase the whole thing.

The tube and assembly have been pulled out and I'm currently trying to come up with a good mounting setup that will support everything and make it easy to move it in/out of the UAII cabinet.  Hope to tackle that this weekend and that's where I stand.

More updates as things start happening.