I am a new member of these forums, but I have been lurking for a long time. For about 10 years now, I have been wanting to build a mame cabinet, but just never had either the room, the time, or the go ahead from my better half. Well everything seemed to work out over the past few months. I finally found the time, room, and got the go ahead. My project started with a friend of mine (who has a small arcade in his house) came across a gutted Killer Instinct cabinet. His plan was to make it into a SNES cabinet, but later realized that he didnt want to invest anything into it so he asked me if I wanted it. I gladly took it with the sole intention of returning it to its former glory and turning it back into a dedicated KI cabinet, but then later decided, I really dont have the room to start collecting right now, so if I was gong to have 1, it was going to have to play more then 1 game. So my plan is to keep the cabinet 100% original looking, but internally, it would run mame. Well that was my plan...
This is what it looked like when I first picked it up.
It was missing EVERYTHING. No monitor, no cp, no bezel, no internals, no coin doors, no back door, nothing but an empty cab. I definatly had my work cut out for me, but at least I didnt have a bunch of old dirty hardware that didnt work and I had to troubleshoot a rats nest of wires and bad boards.
The first thing I did was try and clean it up (and out), then find a TV I could use as a monitor. I realized this would be an easy find because my mother had about seven 22"-32" TVs in her basement that she wasnt doing anything with. She recently just switched over to HDTV's so I knew she wouldnt mind if I cleared up some room and grabbed one from her, but which one? I found one with a composite input that was 25" and in pretty good shape, so thats the one I would be using. Once I brought it home I did some test fitting to see how it would look (and see if it was going to be too big or too small)
While I was planning things out, I built the PC out of spare parts I had. I am pretty sure its a AMD athlon 2.4ghz single core, 120gb HDD, 1GB DDR2, Radeon something... I cant remember, but its a decent agp card. Sound is run onboard through a set of logitech speakers (2 satellites and a sub), OS is Windows XP pro, MAME is a version of kaillera. Not even sure if it is up to date or what I just threw something together for now until I can get a bigger HDD with a complete set of .140 and a decent front end setup on it. But this will tide me over for a little while. Was really looking forward to a hyperspin setup, but its a little laggy on the older hardware so I will choose another when the time comes. Right now I am happy with what I have working.
Since I am working in an apartment and not a house with a basement, garage, or workshop, I am limited to what I can do at once, so I had to plan out my steps. My next step forward was to get the new back door cut, along with the CP cut, and the mounts for the TV. Instead of cracking open the housing and risk the girlfriend touching the flyback or something trying to move it while cleaning and killing herself, I opened it up to measure everything, then closed it back up until I was ready to mount it. When I took it out, I wired up a remote to a pushbutton switch to the power leads and soldered them to the TV mobo. Here are the pictures of the TV housing off and being mounted, and the new back door and CP.
Back door
Back door (from inside cab)
Back door after paint.
CP mockup
CP test fit
CP underside
Monitor mounts
The soldered remote power switch
Mounting it to the original mounts using self tapping screws.
Monitor outside
TV mobo on the inside (mounted to sidewall)
Everything had been cleaned with compressed air since these pics were taken, and a lot of wire management has been enforced throughout the cabinet.
By this time my controls had come in the mail. I ordered some HAPP 8 way competitions and a boatload of pushbuttons. My original plan was to order the pushbuttons and sticks in blue, and only use 6 buttons per player. I printed off a black and white copy of the KI cp artwork and realized just how cramped it was and how close player 1 was to player 2. I remember being younger and having a lot of room, but now that I'm 6' tall and an adult, fitting me and a friend that close together just wasnt an option, so I had to disregard the artwork and spread out the joys from the buttons to give each player a little more arm room and comfort. That decision alone is what set off my cp layout. I decided that if I wasnt going to use the artwork, I might as well plan out the button layout I have always wanted, so I did the classic 3 on top and 4 on bottom (NEOGEO style) for each player. It just made sense. I also decided that since it was no longer an original KI cp, I would keep player 2 as blue joy and pushbuttons, but change player 1 to red. Other then that change, everything else on the cabinet would remain original.
CP map
Drilling the CP
CP test fit with holes
Top view
Now the fun of wiring it up and testing it. I ordered a really nice USB pre-wired interface from Paradise Arcade in Hawaii, so it was actually pretty easy.
Interface
Testing the pushbuttons
Once I had everything working (and labeled) it was time to install the pushbuttons and joysticks and wire them up.
I wired up a few extra buttons for programing etc... and just temp put them on the top here.
Had to test out KI
Now that I had a pretty much fully functional cabinet, it was time to finish up the cosmetics (after playing a few more games of coarse). I am still to this day up in the air on investing time in making a custom monitor bezel out of paper thats 3D. I am planning on getting tinted plexiglass so I dont think it will matter, but in the meantime I had to get something to cover the marquee hole and put something arounf the monitor, so I got some black matboard and cut it to fit.
This is a great solution for a temp bezel and marquee. Now I dont mind playing around on it without it being such an eyesore in the livingroom. The next thing I wanted to do was cover up the holes in the coindoors. I used the same matboard and put it in the holes from the inside. Another temp fix. I ordered the coin pushbuttons from GGG and the vinyl coin door replacement sticker, and I will be covering the coin door holes with a piece of laminated mdf (same as the cp) thats mounted from the inside with another piece of wood screwed from inside to hold it in place, as not to crap up the original cabinet in case I decide that I want to put some real coindoors in it one day. So right now I am in the process of cutting and laminating the mdf and will have that installed with the coin door sticker and pushbuttons installed soon. Until then, I have wired up the pushbuttons to my powersupply to turn on and off with the pc and temp mounted them to the matboard until its finished. I have also relocated the 2 power pushbuttons (one for the TV, and one for the PC) to the top of the cainet. I have yet to drill and mount them correctly, but I will get to that when mounting the coindoor cover.
I am still working on this project, so I will continue to update it as I go along. As of yesterday the original marquee I found came in the mail, so I wired up the florescent marquee light (which I might be replacing soon for an LED one), and tried to clean up some of the artwork on the sides with paint. I still have some to do, but this is how the cab looks so far.
More updates as they happen.
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Topic: First Project (semi restore KI/mame) UPDATED 12/15 (Read 3996 times)
