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Those who have built a cab a couple of years ago...

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Chris:
As for what I would do different, I probably would have waited for 1Up's rotating panel cabinet kit to become available. 

Failing that, I would have kept the cabinet I have now, but I would have stayed in DOS rather than "upgrade" to Windows.

I would have never screwed with cheap PC trackballs and would have gone straight to an arcade ball, although I think good results can be had with a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball. 

I would probably buy an encoder rather than use a KB hack (I'd replace it with a KeyWiz if it had LED support). 

I wouldn't have bothered trying to make a spinner; I'd either go without or buy an Oscar or a Tornado.

I would have gotten or built a cab big enough to take a 27" monitor.  27" is too big for many classics, but I could use the bezel feature for those, or use the extra space for instructions cards, and vertical games would still be a good size and the gun games would have the full 27".  (My cab is 1/2" too narrow to take a WG 27".  :( )

If I didn't get the rotating panel kit, I'd do modular panels.

--Chris

PaulG:
Mine's only 1 year old.  The things I did right:  The Oscar Vortex spinner and Happ 3 inch GT trackball.  The area I'm in the process of fixing right now are the controls and buttons.

When I was doing it, I saw some threads extolling how authentic and silent the Leaf buttons were.  Being new and afraid I was getting in over my head enough, I went with Happ buttons because I didn't care about the superficial "benefits" and didn't want to further complicate the process.  Well, I've come to realize the Leaf buttons are also faster.  And the vast majority of the MAME games I play originally used Leaf buttons.  From a space POV, this probably means a 7 button layout is out, but considering the fighters haven't been touched (Nor the top row of my buttons), it's a waste anyway.  Apply this same thing to joysticks.  The T-Stick Pluses are nice, but I'm on the lookout for Wicos.  Once I get them, I'll order some Leaf buttons and redo the CP.

Dexter:
Well, for a start I wouldn't have let my friends talk me into selling the machines I have done. I went from two uprights and plans for a cocktail, to no machines and a WG d9200 33" still in the box on my kitchen floor!

This summer, have to do it this summer. I'm going to go for the showcase style setup.

Elkor:
I just looked at this forum for the first time in well over a year a few minutes ago, and then I see this post :)

Answer:  I don't know a lot about the brand new stuff, I guess I'll have to do some reading.  Upon scanning this thread I did a lot of the things you guys are saying you would change in my initial build. (27" arcade monitor, oscar pro spinner, ipac)  I never did the lightgun or went the usb route, but this is a dedicated arcade so I never saw the need for usb/mouse support.  I went with commandline linux for the os.

I guess If I could change something I would go with possibly an arcadeVGA setup (provided I could keep it under linux, support was sketchy when it came out) and not go through the additional config of AdvanceMAME which I have *never* got working at 100% (some stuff still locks up randomly).  I could probably fix it all with a few good solid days of ripping through the code and rebuilding the software but I just wind up talking about doing that a lot and never actually doing it ;-)

Kook:
Here is what I have, what worked well, and what didn't work so well

Cabinet: Mortal Kombat II. Very happy with this. Roomy cabinet, nice control panel, 25" display. Acquired for $375 at auction. Eventually, I turned it into a MAME machine. The conversion is completely reversible (I didn't cut holes or damage anything). It's fun when folks come over and see MKII running on this MKII cabinet, then I hit a couple of buttons and reveal that it is a multi-game machine, then hit a couple more buttons, grab a wireless keyboard, and reveal that it is a fully functional computer, with a broadband Internet connection!

JAMMA PCBs: For a while, when I first got my cabinet, I bought various JAMMA boards on ebay so I could play a bunch of different games in my cabinet just by changing PCBs. After a while, the board swapping was just too much of a hassle.

Mobo: AMD Duron 1800. Works very well with most MAME, SNES, and Genesis games I have tried. In terms of speed, my arbitrary goal was have no discernible difference between my original Jamma MKII and MAME MKII. It achieves this.

Memory: 512 MB. No problems at all.

Video: Trident Blade T64 (driving the 25 inch arcade monitor). It's great, but... my only complaint is that the screen is scrambled until my Blade driver loads. I chose the Trident card because the ArcadeVGA card was more expensive, and folks said the Trident card had more vibrant colors. However, if I ever build another cab, I might take another look at the ArcadeVGA.

Interface: JPAC (PS2 based). This thing is awesome. Basically the heart of the system. I like the way it protects my 15KHz monitor if my video card tries to send the wrong frequency (which happens a little too often). Highly recommended.

Audio: PCI based SB Live. Was a hassle getting it to work reliably in DOS. Never did get it to work reliably with ADVMAME running multiple emulators under DOS. Works well with Mamewah in Windows though, and eventually I learned that Mamewah and Windows was the best combination for my cab. I'm not sure there is a better alternative sound card. Some folks say ISA sound cards are better, but I don't think you can get a modern, fast motherboard with ISA slots any more.

Frontend: Mamewah. I ran ADVMenu for a while, but I had various issues with it when switching between emulators or entering/exiting emulators. I think it was mostly due to compatibility problems with my 15KHz video driver, SB Live driver under DOS, etc. Mamewah is great, but my biggest complaint with it is the performance issue when dealing with large lists.

OS: Windows 98se. I started out with DOS (WIN98se DOS) but eventually discovered (to my surprise) that games ran a little faster under Windows, and that Mamewah under Windows worked better for me than ADVMenu under DOS. Windows also makes it possible to add USB game controllers and has built-in networking (which comes in handy sometimes). If I had to do it all over again, I would probably try Windows XP.

Emulators: For MAME, ADVMame (great if you like to tweak and want to get your arcade games to look great on an arcade monitor). For SNES, ZSNESW (hacked so that Esc exits the emulator) and, for Genesis, WGENS (also hacked so that Esc exits the emulator).

Joysticks: HAPP Competition joysticks. I didn't realize how sloppy the joysticks in my cab were until I replaced them with the Happ Competition sticks. They are great.

Gamepads: Cordless Logitech Rumblepad II's. This worked out nice. For games that work better with a gamepad instead of the cabinet control panel, there are two cordless rumblepads stored behind the coin door. They work great and you can use two simultaneously. Two complaints: 1) You can only activate a profile for one rumblepad at any given time; so, for example, if I want to assign "Z" to gamepad 1, button 1, and assign "/" to gamepad 2, button 1... you can't do that. 2) I haven't found any emulators that make the rumble feature rumble (although I haven't really looked all that hard).

Keyboard/Mouse: Logitech cordless desktop. What amazes me is that the wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, and wireless gamepads all work fine together.

Kook

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