Cabinet Build Chronicles ... from start to finish

[Bill Mote]

A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of building an arcade cabinet.  He showed me plans for a small cocktail table cabinet that would play all the old arcade games.  I spent so much money as a kid playing video games how could I resist building my own cabinet that would let me play with unlimited quarters!  My parents would rejoice that their piggy banks would finally have silvered coins in them again

Over the next few posts I'll chronicle my experiences and include pictures.  I can't even begin to do so without crediting BYOAC and the marvelous book: Project Arcade.  The book was an immense help and the project would not have been completed without the information contained within.

So, sit back and enjoy ... I'll start work on the thread tonight.

dot

[pointdablame]

congrats on starting your cab

Just be sure to put your thread in the Project Announcements board, not the Main board... that's what it's there for

EDIT: well doesn't this post look dumb now that Peale moved it lol.   

[SirPeale]

I was going to move it when he first made it, but it looked like he was going to make some more posts right after.  So I waited.

Then he didn't make any more posts, and I was going to move it anyway...

[Bill Mote]

I finally installed a coin door.  I built the cabinet as a Christmas present for my kids.  It's been *awesome*!  We're going to mount an LED assembly to light the trackball when I get back from my business trip.  That will pretty much finalize the cabinet.

It's a cross between the Jakobud and the Lucent cabinet design, but I notched out the back so that it wasn't 1 big straight line.  (Just below the TV it cuts in ~8 inches on a 45 degree angle and then goes down to the floor.  The cabinet is basically the Lusent design modified as previously mentioned as well as a little in the front to handle the Jakobud in-line 4 player panel.

I might add a light gun or 2 in the future, but we'll see.  Anyway, here's the latest shot:



dot

[AlanS17]

A 3-slot coin door? How does player 4 coin up?

[Bill Mote]

There's always a critic in the crowd.  Well, it's not wired up yet.  Just cut it in tonight.  Need to get the lights working and wire it to the IPAC/4.  Figured I'd wire 3 and 4 together.  That was my best guess.  Any other ideas?

Why a 3-slot?  Because it was $40 and it included the lights, the coin mechanism, and the barrel lock w/keys.  Oh, and it's BRAND NEW.  You gotta love eBay.

dot

[AlanS17]

It's just an honest question. Most 4 player games need all 4 coin slots to work properly.

[Bill Mote]

I know you didn't mean any harm.  Just poking fun a little.  I figured if I wired 3 & 4 on the 3rd slot then they'd both get a credit from the single drop   It's not obvious from the picture but there are "coin" buttons on the control panel so the door, while soon-to-be functional, is more for show than anything else.

Asthetically the cabinet looks *very* different with the door.  The big purple front really needed something to break up all that Barney

[Thenasty]

you don't even need to do any wiring at all for #4.
Just go to MAME setup.

Coin 1 = 5
coin 2 = 6
Coin 3 = 7
Coin 4 = 7

So when you insert coin in 3, it gives credits to player 3 and 4.

[Bill Mote]

Good one!

[SirPeale]

hj

[Bill Mote]

The 2006 update.  The kids still enjoy the arcade cabinet.  For my middle son's birthday I held a tournament with about 1/2 dozen games.  I printed out ladder forms and had the kids fill in their names.  I pre-printed certificates for the winners that I could re-run through the printer to add their names.  It was very cool and the kids had a lot of fun.

I've added a light gun with limited success.  I can't seem to get it calibrated exactly (about 1" off on both axis).  I did okay with police trainer and my kids seemed to do okay with it so no biggy.

My hard drive died last month.  I had a small 20g HDD that had as much as I could load on it.  That's where my mistake was.  With all the data on one drive it was nearly impossible to backup.  I have started the rebuild of the OS.  I'll post my build script when I'm done.  Right now I have all of XP running in 54 MB of RAM!  The box itself is a P4 1.6 w/768 MB of RAM, 300 GB HDD, and a Radeon 9200SE (no fan!) video card.  That means the only 2 moving parts are the PSU fan and the HDD.

I partitioned the HDD into 3 partitions: OS, DATA, and SWAPFILE.  The OS is ~20g and the SWAPFILE is ~6g.  The rest is for MAME and MameWAH.

Why did I separate off the swapfile?  In the old school days you'd do so if you could put it on a different spindle for performance.  I'm on one HDD so performance wasn't the reason.  I put it on it's own partition to help minimize fragmentation.  It may not be that big of an issue on a cab where data won't change much, but it's become a common practice (for me) nonetheless.

With the OS on it's own partition I can capture periodic ghost images of the OS and be running in no time after another failure.  On the data partition I'll use XP's built-in backup to capture configuration files from MAME and MameWAH.  I'm even going to sysprep the system and capture an image so I can apply the image to different hardware in the future if the need arises!

dot

[SirPeale]

hj

I'm thinking the kids must have gotten ahold of the keyboard a year ago.

[Stobe]

The title of this thread is more suiting than I first imagined.  "From start to finish" ??

Yup, in the first post, you said you were starting.  Next thing I know, you were finished, hehe.

I must have missed the whole "Chronicle-ing" part.

All joking aside, I like your HD partitioning idea.  Makes sense.

-Stobe

[Bill Mote]

The best laid plans of mice and men ...

It took me 3 months to build my cabinet working on it in the evenings after work.  I finished it on Christmas Eve and rolled it into the house during a gigantic ice storm.  Nothing like 3 guys moving 400 lbs. on an icy sidewalk!

Serioiusly, I had hoped to document the basic construction of the cabinet along with all the things that came up along the way.  What I decided was that information had been chronicled numerous times.  What you really won't find anywhere is a good OS build script.  Build scripts have long been a staple of mine and there's nothing like knowing the next system you build is click-for-click the same as your last.  So, I'm going to post my build script when I'm done.  There will be a number of dot-isms in the scripts that you're all free to debate, but by and large I won't be changing much

Some things I call dot-isms:

* Change the recycle bin to 1%
* Change IE's cache to 5 MB
* Displaying the file extensions plus full path in the title and address bar

I'm more than willing to provide the thought process behind anything you'll find the forthcoming script.  Just ask.

dot

[monzamess]

Dumb question: Is this an automatic script to run after the basic OS install, or is it a manual script of "do this, do that" etc? An automatic script would be great (even if I go and change a lot of your settings. )

[Bill Mote]

Dumb question: Is this an automatic script to run after the basic OS install, or is it a manual script of "do this, do that" etc? An automatic script would be great (even if I go and change a lot of your settings. )

Well, there's a lot of do-this-do-that, but I am including the registry files for a number of the changes to speed things along.  Take a look:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=59353.0

dot