Several cocktail Cabinet questions

[lokki]

Hi,
I'm planning on making a CockTail Cabinet (based partially in the 2-box Cocktail Cabinet
plans from mameroom)

I was planning on the following configuration for each player

4/8 switchable joystick (probably a T-Stik or E-Stik)
4 Game buttons

I'm thinking of using a Standard PC monitor (19" if I can find a good price on one) with everything rotated 90 Degrees. Haven't decided on the Specs for the PC but I hope I can do a 1Ghz or Greater

And the following questions come to mind.

1) Which OS?
Personally I'm leaning to DOS but if there are good arguments to use Windows I'll consider them.
2) Which Front End.
If I choose DOS I think I will use ArcadeOS. Any other nice frontends for Vertical set ups?

3) Which Emulator?
I was thinking of using VAntAGE. But I think I would be missing out on some Games by not using MAME.


4) List of Vertical Games that support cocktail flip
Is this list available?

5) List of Games that will work with this control Set up.
Single 4 or 8 Joystick and a maximum of 4 buttons.

6) Any Controls that I should consider adding?
I don't think I have the real state for a trackball, But

[Lilwolf]

1) Which OS?
Personally I'm leaning to DOS but if there are good arguments to use Windows I'll consider them.

You could go either way.  You might find a few games that wont run on windows that would on dos.  But if your looking at vertical only... this number might go down to non.  But what do you have running on the disk right now?  If windows is on the drive now... try them quickly and see how the games you want to run run... Classics probably wont be an issue at all.


3) Which Emulator?
I was thinking of using VAntAGE. But I think I would be missing out on some Games by not using MAME.

MAME.  VAntAGE would do, but its overkill.  You have 2x the power needed for VAntAGE... Get mame working... If there are games you want to run, but wont run in mame on the computer... try the others... but every game that VAntAGE runs should run full speed on a 1ghz machine in mame in windows... So not an issue.

4) List of Vertical Games that support cocktail flip
Is this list available?

Do you care?  Dont you want more then just that?   (and there is a great web based one... and I don't have the link... anyone else??)

5) List of Games that will work with this control Set up.
Single 4 or 8 Joystick and a maximum of 4 buttons.

Same site as in 4... (ie, don't remember... at work)

6) Any Controls that I should consider adding?
I don't think I have the real state for a trackball, But

[lokki]

You could go either way.

[Howard_Casto]

Windows and probably windows xp at that. 

You have a 1 gig processor, why in the world would you bother with cumbersome dos?

And I've said again and again how dos can't take advantage of higher end hardware, so if you are going with anything greater than that 1 gig, dos won't take advantage of it anyway.  This is especially true with system memory.  But I've said it all before, why not look up older posts. 

Also the big kicker.  If you get a good video card, it will support hardware screen rotation in windows.  Then your rotation woes are over as any program, front end, game or emulator is supported with no slowdown regardless of if it's been specifically coded for rotation.   It should be noted that neither dos, nor linux can take advantage of such a card. 

To put it frankly, if you are going to use dos then you need a crappier machine, else what you are suggesting is complete overkill considering that  you'll be limited to only mame and there aren't a ton of vertical games in mame that aren't "classic" era. 

Windows offers the most choices and considering you have enough juice to use it I don't see why you'd bother with any other os. 

Remember guys, dos is less of an option and more of a last resort.

Ragarding some of the other questions. 

Vantage is for crappy pentium class machines.  You'll get absolutely no speed increase from using it (as it only supports "classic" games and your machine has more than enoguh resources for them) and considering it's not as widely supported as mame, you'd just be setting yourself up for unnecessary headaches. 

In regards to which emulator I think I've made my point clear on that one.  Why limit yourself to one emulator when you can run windows and use them all?

Don't add any additional controls unless you plan on making a whole new removable panel.  Cocktail panels are tiny and clutter looks extremely bad on them.  And on top of that any additional clutter really gets in the way of gameplay. 


The advanced type of filtering you are asking for in regards to gamelists can only be done with the controls.dat project.  Unfortunatley, it's far from complete. 
fe.donkeyfly.com


Hope that helps.

[lokki]

Windows and probably windows xp at that.

[kcoleman]

[lokki]

What do you mean by hardware rotation. is that different than using the -ror command in mame to flip the screen or is this to flip the front end?

[jcrouse]

Hardware rotation wil rotate the entire Windows desktop AND any applications that are running on said desktop. Pivot Pro will doe this also. What Howard was referring to is built into the driver for newer ATI and nVidia video cards. You seem to be slightly misinformed. Most front ends DO NOT support rotation, at least the don't provide the rotation. The rotation needs provided by either the video card drivers or a third party app such as Pivot Pro.

Do yourself a favor and just get rid any thoughts of DOS. Get Windows XP and be done with it. As Howard stated, there are just more options, period. If your looking at used equipment a PIII-1GB will only be a few dollars more that say and old PII-300 (DOS box).

What you have touched upon here, orientation and a cocktail cabinet can be a very tricky thing, depending how perfedt you want to make it, the control panels on your cabinet and just how much you want to hide the OS.

Good Luck,
John

[lokki]

Hardware rotation wil rotate the entire Windows desktop AND any applications that are running on said desktop. Pivot Pro will doe this also. What Howard was referring to is built into the driver for newer ATI and nVidia video cards. You seem to be slightly misinformed. Most front ends DO NOT support rotation, at least the don't provide the rotation. The rotation needs provided by either the video card drivers or a third party app such as Pivot Pro.

I guess you are right I was thinking of ArcadeOS which does support rotation. And I seem to remember that there was vertical version of MAMEWah, but not sure if is still supported (updated).

Do yourself a favor and just get rid any thoughts of DOS. Get Windows XP and be done with it. As Howard stated, there are just more options, period. If your looking at used equipment a PIII-1GB will only be a few dollars more that say and old PII-300 (DOS box).

I like the idea of using freeDos and not have to buy an additional XP license just for the Cabinet

[elvis]

4 Game buttons

I'm building a cocktail cab at the moment, also with vertical monitor.  I used "sortinfo" to check buttons, and there aren't any games other than Toobin that need more than 3 buttons.

http://hem.passagen.se/robert.palmqvist/Downloads/downloads.html

Haven't decided on the Specs for the PC but I hope I can do a 1Ghz or Greater

I'm using an AthlonXP 1500+ (1.33GHz) in mine.  It's *JUST* enough to play gunbird2, which is one of the heavier vertical games.

1) Which OS?

Holy cow, don't ask that in here! You're likely to start a religious war! 

4) List of Vertical Games that support cocktail flip
Is this list available?

[EDIT] - I misread the question.  I assumed you wanted just vertical games, not flip-only.  I have't checked, but SortInfo may have that information also. [/EDIT]

Again, I used "sortinfo" (link above).  Output the MAME info through the xml2info like such:

mame --listxml | xml2info > listinfo.txt

Run SortInfo, and import the mame listinfo file you created (file -> import).

Clicking the menu headers, you can sort the information by whichever column you want.  I sort by orientation, and then delete the horizontal games out of the list.  From there I export the list to a CSV file which can be opened in any spreadsheet application (OpenOffice Calc is free and will do it, also MS Excel if you have that already).

I then copy and paste just the filenames column into a plain text file called "filenames.txt".  This should be a plani text file with a single column of text, and each entry is the game name minus the ".zip" extension. (One game per line).

Now, assuming my ROMs are in c:\mame\roms and I want just the vertical ROMs copied to c:\mame\vert, I use the following command:

for /f "delims=," %%I IN (filenames.txt) DO copy "c:\mame\roms\%%I.*" c:\mame\vert"

And it will run through the created list, copying only the vertical games across.  Very handy.  All up there's just shy of about 1.8GB of vertical games, which was just enough for me to squeeze them all onto a 2GB hard disk with a working Linux+AdvanceMAME/Menu setup.  (No X needed, instead I used SVGALib).

I use the same list later on to copy all of the corresponding PNG files from CrashTest's screenshot archive, obviously just pointing the script to my snapshots folder instead of the ROMs folder.

5) List of Games that will work with this control Set up.
Single 4 or 8 Joystick and a maximum of 4 buttons.

Again, sortinfo will help you there.

[Howard_Casto]

A final note about portrait software....  to put it nicely it doesn't work.  Well it works if you don't want to run anything that uses directx (this includes mame and any other emulator) and you don't mind a 30-50% speed decrease.  If you want to run more than mame on a vertical cab a video card that supports hardware rotation is literally the only option you have. 

[elvis]

Who in their right mind uses portrait software?  Just use a front-end that supports a vertical orientation.  There's plenty of them about.

[Howard_Casto]

Who in their right mind uses portrait software?

[jcrouse]

Who in their right mind uses portrait software?

[elvis]

Wow... we all woke up on the wrong side of bed today, didn't we?

Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, paint.NET (free) or the GIMP (free) all support batching.  It's not that hard to rotate a batch group of images (5 mouse clicks and you're done).  Gamelauncher vertical goodness ahoy!

http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/
http://www.gimp.org/

I get this funny feeling none of the folks here are interested into putting effort into making a decent cab.  You all seem to want your hand held and have all the work done for you.  That's not really in the spirit of MAME cab building.  Kudos go to all the front-end authors for their many and varied efforts.  Yes, even you, Howard.  Remember that choice is good, and there will never be a one-size-fits-all software solution.

Oh, and I can think of one other frontend that supports any orientation you'd care to throw at it without performance loss.  But I dare not mention it's name in yet another Howard_Casto thread! 

You lot are a grumpy bunch.  I was under the impression we all did this for fun, not to waste our days bitching at each other over who was the "rightest".  Smile!  It doesn't hurt, and people like it!

[Howard_Casto]

elvis we aren't mad at you, it's just you aren't listening nor are you making any sense. 

If you use HARDWARE rotation then ANYTHING in windows can be rotated without ANY performance loss. 

Portrait doesn't work well at all, but none of us were suggesting that anyone use it because it is based on SOFTWARE rotation. 

Also you keep saying there are several front ends that support rotation (and we are talking about windows exclusively at this point) and simply put, with the except of the two I mentioned, none of the good ones do.  Two is not several.

And yes, you can batch convert the images for gamelauncher use, but considering gamelauncher is unskinnable and doesn't work well in windows, you are better off using dos at which point the issue of hardware rotation is null and void.  I just mentioned it because people always bring it up in these type of threads and I wanted to point out that it doesn't truely rotate before someone even went there. 

I apologize for the all caps words, but I don't think you are carefully reading this stuff.


It's not a question of who is the rightest, but we don't want bad information to be spread around confusing the patrons, and that is what you are doing in this thread.

[Howard_Casto]

I like the idea of using freeDos and not have to buy an additional XP license just for the Cabinet

Not that I am endorsing piracy in any way, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone with multiple home-built pcs in their home that actually have a liscense for every single pc. That doesn't mean that they don't all have xp on it. 

Again, stealing is bad, I'm just saying. 

[elvis]

I'm in the process of building a vertical-only Japanese/Australian style cocktail cab at the moment.  The software, computer and monitor are all built and ready to go.  I'm cutting the wood over the next few days for assembly after Christmas some time.

As I've mentioned a few times now, the cab is running Slackware Linux 9.1 and AdvanceMenu for the frontend to AdvanceMAME.  The graphical output uses the SVGAlib graphics library which is extremely compact in size (less than 5MB installed and running for the SVGAlib binaries and libraries, post-compile).  This means no Xfree86/Xorg and no SDL.   In fact, all vertical games and corresponding PNG screenshots from Crashtest's collection, Operating System, compiler, AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMenu fit on a 2GB hard disk, with room to spare.  That itself suits me just fine, as I've got literally a dozen of these old hard disks lying around that just simply aren't big enough for any windows (or even linux) desktop or server use.

AdvanceMenu is pretty neat.  You just whack the "0" (zero) key on the numeric keypad of your keyboard, and the display will rotate 90 degrees (images, skins, text, everything).  No performance loss either.  Just keep hitting that until the display meets the needs of your cab, and the settings are saved automagically for next reboot.  Alternatively you could even put a button somewhere on the cab that rotates the display as needed (useful if the Player2 wants to select a game from the other side of the cab).  No mucking about with hardware rotation or third-party software required.  Hell, you don't even need a mouse!  It's just a single button press away, which is perfect for my cab (but not for everyone's, of course).

Now I'm not in any way trying to give "bad information".  The setup works well, and was easy enough to get installed and working the way I needed it to be.  It runs in a vertical orientation for both the front-end and games, which was my need for this cab.  I'm a functionalist at heart.  I use what I consider to be the best Windows-based front end on my standing cab (link in my sig) - MAMEWah.  But when I embarked on a vertical-only cab, after much searching and stuffing around, AdvanceMENU suited my needs the best.

Again I say, choice is good.  If there were only 2 front-ends (and I speak generally, for the moment, not vertical-only) on the planet, life would suck for cab builders.  But there are many, and all of them vary in features, eye-candy, intended use (cab versus desktop), etc.

What I see above is two fellows getting annoyed at me for telling the world how my setup works.  I have no intention of converting the world to linux (well, not all of it anyway  ) nor do I think AdvanceMENU and AdvanceMame are the answer for the less technically-minded.  Lord knows, some of the questions that are asked on the AdvanceM* mailing lists show lack of said technical knowhow by the general public.  But that is not a criticism: many folks just want to play games, and can't be arsed setting up complex software to do so.  In that case, go for what is easiest to set up.  But do be aware that alternatives exist, and can sometimes do the particular job it is that the original poster of this thread has requested.

So with that in mind, my thanks to Howard for listing two front-ends that support native rotation, and for bringing up the issue of card-level hardware rotation.

And just to be a smartarse for a moment:

sev