mame in jamma arcade machine

[evil homer]

hi everybody 

i've just bought a jamma arcade machine off ebay

i payed £100 and it came with a Wonderboy in Monsterland PCB

this is my second machine, i used to have a small cabaret machine (think it was electrocoin) without swappable marquee with Streetfighter 2, Pang , MK, World Rally and Golfing Greats.

I'm planning on fitting a pc inside to run mame on it but i would prefer if i used my arcade screen and could insert coins to play the games and would appreciate any advice given as to items i need to purchace to do this (or handy tips)

as far as i understand it i would need a j-pac to connect the pc to the jamma interface, and an arcade vga card, also i would need to sort the sound out. i would be using my old pc (pentium 4 3.4, 1gb ram, 250g hd)
i have used mame 32 before and atomic fe (which i prefer)


the machine is only a 1 player 2 button set up but a j-pac has connections on it for extra buttons (i think)

[waveryder]

I love those silverline machines. My first cab was the exact same model. I mounted 2 peakers in the bottom of the cab where the coin boxes are. The built in speaker is poo!. Before getting all worked up mameing it, the first thing I did was get the metal control panel remade at my local sheet metal works and turned it into a 2 player 6 button cab. Then stick in the jpac and arcadevga and wire in the extra buttons. My £0.02

[evil homer]

aw man, that control panel looks great 
thats what i hope mine will look like

don't think i have a local as such metalworkers, i'll have to find one 
btw how much did it cost you to have the panel made?

[waveryder]

I had 2 done for £15. Had plans for the second one but sold "neverland" in blind panic when my missus anounced she was pregnant.  I literally just wandered into a metal workers I found in the yellow pages with the original panel and asked them. Had to drill it myself though. With holes and the clamp brackets the price sky rocketed. In the end I countersunk the bolts for the brackets and drilled out the buttons with a bi-metal holesaw. Those panels were tough as old boots and stood up to an amazing amount of punishment. Well worth getting done. I also swapped out the 15khz monitor for a vga compatible arcade monitor, WGU300. Same aspect and shape. The chasis just fit straight in over the original. In the end it was cheaper than the Jpac/Arcadevga etc. Just bought an ipac and was off.

[Nemss316]

I am currently MAME'ing a Jamma cab myself.

Instead of building a new CP, i just drilled the extra holes in the existing CP, and wired the buttons.  The JAMMA should have the hookups for 3 buttons per player, and then the JPAC will wire up to 4 buttons per player, so even if you have two buttons wired for JAMMA, you can wire the extra 4 buttons per player on the JPAC, assuming you are doing a SF2 set up. You can see if your PC's video card will accept the Soft15KHz, or go the ArcadeVGA route instead.

Overall, I felt way out of my league when I first bought my cabinet a few weeks ago. But upon doing a lof of research and asking the people on these boards, who are extremely helpful I might add, have really helped me out a lot. I'm in the process of getting everything loaded on my PC, and are waiting for my new CP overlay and marquee before I hook everything up.

[evil homer]

another thing i've got to consider is getting "free" rom sets off people who charge a nominal fee for burning rom sets to dvd. are there any good suggestions of sites/people who do them or a thread about it i should read?
one possibility is i've got an external 250gig hard drive, could i not send the hard drive to someone who would put the rom files on it? i'm planning to have more than just mame roms on my machine, i suppose another question i must ask then is, is having console games on a mame machine harder to do and will they work on the screen resolution on my arcade monitor?

the emulators i have are mame 32 and atomic fe, with the atomic fe you download the emulators and add them to the front end so that theres a new option to play snes or whatever (but i'm guessing you know that)
one of the things i want to be able to keep the 10p/20p a go pay for play

@ Nemss316, yeah mate, i've been learning a lot from looking on this site,  i've know all about mame for ages but i was under the impression that you had to gut a machine to mame it which doesn't sound too appealing (to me anyway)