Author Topic: Cabinet running a single rom? (Read 2451 times)

juan_caliente · « **on:** January 04, 2006, 09:09:19 am »

Hello Everyone,

I am building a pac-man upright cabinet for my wife and she only wants her cabinet to run pac-man, nothing else. Is it possible to set an emulator to run a single game in this manner? I plan on building a mvs 4 slot from scratch to cover the other games for myself.

Thank you for your input.

Gaston77 · « **Reply #1 on:** January 04, 2006, 09:16:15 am »

sure thing

no different than creating a cabinet with 5000 games. Dont know if you want to use a frontend in this case? If not, you might get your PC to "shell" straight into pacman. which means you power up and pacman starts playing. be sure you have got all the settings right before you do this though... shelling is a decision you have to be sure of. Do a search on this forum on shell or autostart and you will be happy.

Good luck!

Gaston77 · « **Reply #2 on:** January 04, 2006, 09:32:22 am »

Are you going to use an original Rom or an emulator? This question because you are going to use an MVS 4 slot for yourself? If you ahve the original Rom (!) it should be a piece of cake! Well....more or less

walls83 · « **Reply #3 on:** January 04, 2006, 10:20:40 am »

she doesnt want ms pac man..? The travisty..

juan_caliente · « **Reply #4 on:** January 04, 2006, 11:08:29 am »

I know!:) But I want to do what makes her happy. I was looking around and found Vantage and AMOAD, both of which seem to be able to run from the floppy drive. Does this mean I can get away with not having a hd, just set the bios to boot from the a: and have it start up each time? This should be pretty fast I would think. Any experience with either of these?

Gaston77 · « **Reply #5 on:** January 04, 2006, 11:17:25 am »

hmm. mame is dos based so that should be ok. you will need to program a bit to make sure it starts up immediately (not much though). If you change the boot directory to A:\, it wont automatically start up with the CD running. You need to boot to A:\ where an unzipped version of mame is. You need to setup mame the way you want to (controls for example). You also need to shell your pc so that it runs mame with pcman (i.e. A:\mame.exe -mspcman)
Shouldnt be that hard...

anybody correct me if Im wrong.

I dont have any experience with Vantage or Amoad, but what you want is not that hard.

thebrownshow · « **Reply #6 on:** January 04, 2006, 11:43:01 am »

If you just want a cabinet that plays Pac-man, why not skip the PC and do something like this:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=36591.0

juan_caliente · « **Reply #7 on:** January 04, 2006, 11:54:22 am »

I will have to take a look at that but I really wanted it to feel authentic, you know like when a rom starts up how the "machine" runs through all of the checks. Just looks very original.

Grasshopper · « **Reply #8 on:** January 04, 2006, 12:26:57 pm »

If your motherboard supports the facility then why not boot up from a USB pendrive? It would be faster than booting from a floppy and totally silent.

juan_caliente · « **Reply #9 on:** January 04, 2006, 01:10:50 pm »

Actually I don't even know if my mb supports usb, it is an old k6-2 400, can't argue with free, and it should play pacman just fine. I have an extra 17gig hd but it seemed like a waste for just one rom. Mabey I will do pacmame and install all the variants for her?

brian23 · « **Reply #10 on:** January 04, 2006, 01:27:01 pm »

If pac-man is all you want, get the bartop kit http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=45304.0 for $179 and hack a couple Jakks like markrvp did in the above thread. It's actually really easy and won't take as long as a full size cab per se.

Tiger-Heli · « **Reply #11 on:** January 04, 2006, 01:31:06 pm »

OTOH, if you want to stick with MAME or Vantage or AMOAD, booting directly into the game should be no problem.

Besides the floppy and USB pendrive, another option would be a bootable CD-ROM with like Knoppix MAME, or even DOS and an emulator on the CD, although I'm not sure how to set it up.

juan_caliente · « **Reply #12 on:** January 04, 2006, 01:34:00 pm »

Would be nice, but:
a) We don't have any counter/table space.
b) The wife wants the full size

The full size complete with artwork and proper 4-way is not negotiable, only the software.

Grasshopper · « **Reply #13 on:** January 04, 2006, 01:38:09 pm »

I wouldn't bother hacking a Jakks unit. They're pretty cool but if you're going to the trouble of building a cab you'll probably want complete authenticity and a second hand PC capable of running MAME can be bought dirt cheap these days.

By the way if your motherboard doesn't support USB then as an alternative you could buy an IDE to compact flash converter.

juan_caliente · « **Reply #14 on:** January 04, 2006, 02:18:02 pm »

Would USB or CF memory really boot that much faster? I know I can get a 128mb pen drive for about 10 bucks so it might be worth looking at. I would love for my wife to be able to flip the switch, the lights come on and the ram check for the rom to start running, then pacman. I have everything, the 19" monitor, pc, hd, fd, cdr, ps, buttons, the only thing I don't have is the 4-way ball top, I have 8 ways and the usb or cf memory. I have often thought in the past about loading xp onto a cf card to help with boot times. If I were to put it on a pen drive, use a sb16 for audio and onboard graphics, how fast do you think I could get it to boot to pacman?

Tiger-Heli · « **Reply #15 on:** January 04, 2006, 02:49:29 pm »

Personal opinion - it's still going to boot fastest to a HD (and will do just what you want). Floppies are noisy, as are CD-ROMs. PenDrives aren't, but you can probably get something like a used 3.2G HD at the mom and pop computer store for practically free.

juan_caliente · « **Reply #16 on:** January 04, 2006, 03:06:39 pm »

Actually I just checked my garage and I have 3 old 4 gig hds so I am set there. What do you think would be the fastest way to get pacman to boot?

RayB · « **Reply #17 on:** January 04, 2006, 04:11:16 pm »

Umm all this talk of booting from a floppy. What OS would fit on a floppy?

Ed_McCarron · « **Reply #18 on:** January 04, 2006, 04:26:51 pm »

thebrownshow · « **Reply #19 on:** January 04, 2006, 05:27:30 pm »

If you're really concerned about the extra 15 seconds it'll buy you, you can bash your head against the wall with DOS and just have your Autoexec.bat file launch mame and run pac-man right from the start. That all depends on whether or not you can get a souncard to work with DOS... but if that older motherboard has an ISA slot you should be good to go.

Otherwise, just run the most stripped-down version of windows you can and have it launch a batch file on startup that runs MAME. No frontend or anything.

Kind of a shame though, if you're going to put all the guts in there for a fully fledged MAME cabinet, you should at least put a few other games in, like Ms. Pac-Man or Frogger.

Tiger-Heli · « **Reply #20 on:** January 05, 2006, 11:37:15 am »

Quote from: thebrownshow on January 04, 2006, 05:27:30 pm

If you're really concerned about the extra 15 seconds it'll buy you, you can bash your head against the wall with DOS and just have your Autoexec.bat file launch mame and run pac-man right from the start.

Bloinkxp · « **Reply #21 on:** January 05, 2006, 03:06:19 pm »

On a PIII500 machine AMOD Galaga takes 25 seconds to load.
This is including the sound card which is a SB16 PCI card.

juan_caliente · « **Reply #22 on:** January 06, 2006, 07:25:44 am »

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I think I am going to make the cabinet a 100% pac-man replica but have it boot into a custom front end with her name on it and a few games that can be played with a 4-way and mabey one button, so it still looks very original, mabey a black button so it does not stand out. I think this should keep her happy.

RayB · « **Reply #23 on:** January 06, 2006, 11:03:27 pm »

Quote from: juan_caliente on January 06, 2006, 07:25:44 am

Thank you everyone for your suggestions.

brophog · « **Reply #24 on:** January 07, 2006, 03:20:06 am »

Here's a secret women don't want to tell you: The easiest way to keep them happy is the same way you want to be kept happy........in the bedroom.

SirPeale · « **Reply #25 on:** January 07, 2006, 08:32:46 am »

As someone that's built a bunch of DOS based cabinets, let me toss in my .02

First: forget booting from a floppy. Yes, you can get 1.44M of info on one, but it's just torture. eBay regularly has small drives for sale for extra, super cheap. Most normally because someone just wants them out of their house. I'm using a 200M drive on my Galaxian conversion, and I think I'm using *maybe* 20M of it. And that's with a bunch of extras that I just tossed on there.

I just bought this to play with. Boot time should be minimal, don't need a hard drive, silent operation, and storage is the amount I choose.

You didn't mention what kind of monitor you want to use, but I suggest a real arcade monitor. Depending on your locale, you can find one from free to just a few bucks. Might need a little work, but this *is* a project, right?

To save a bunch of woodworking, you can probably find a converted Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man, Galaxian or Galaga cabinet that's empty or just has some POS game in it for cheap. That's how I got mine.

And finally, for booting into a single game, it's as easy as this: at the end of your autoexec.bat...

cd \mame103
dmame pacman


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