Hello all. I'm new here and I thought I'd introduce my self, I'm Shawn and am from the Orlando Fl. area. I'm new to the wonderful hobby of arcades and have been using MAME since the 90's when it was a command line program. I decided to get into this hobby after a good friend built his own MAME machine and eventually ended up collecting probably over 20 arcade machines and pinball machines and after playing a few of the classics that I grew up playing, I got hooked!!!
Before I decided to get into this new hobby, I was an avid giant scale R/C model aircraft builder and flier (hence my screen name) which I decided to take a break from and try something new. And here I am!! Although I would love to eventually, have my own arcade room filled with classics like Dragons Lair, Pacman etc.... I decided to start cheap (Hey I'm married with children LOL) and go with a MAME machine. After searching around the area for a while I was lucky enough to acquire a used (but in fairly good shape) and partially gutted Sega World Series 99 cabinet for a really good deal to use as the base for my MAME machine. I wanted to use an authentic arcade monitor that is used in a Bally / Midway cabinet for example. But they were a bit out of my price range, so I decided to use a 21" CRT that I got new from a local computer store for $29.99!
The computer that will run all of my emulators and games is a Pentium based board from an old computer that I bought used from work.
The specs are P-4 2.0ghz socket 475 1gb of DDR memory a 256mb PCI GeForce graphics card that I got on sale for $29.00 at a local CompUsa / Tiger Direct, The optical drive is an internal DVD R R-W +/- w Lightscribe that I got for $19.00 on sale at CompUsa.
The Operating system is XP Media Center 2005, and is stored on 2 160gb 7200 rpm IDE drives that have 2 80 gb partitions on each HDD.
I decided to use a 6ch. PCI surround sound card with a midi / game controller so I can use my old Thrustmaster steering wheel and flight stick (hey they are old but they still work great!!) that I will incorporate into the control panel when I build it. The case is really cool in that it is a rack mountable server case with a locking front lid. I will mount the case in the cabinet on drawer sliders as it has the necessary mounting holes in the sides of the case.
As far as the control panel goes, I picked up a used 3" Happs track ball for $10.00 that needed some TLC. I was told when I got the trackball that it needed rebuilt, but all it needed was the thick dust cleaned out of it that had built up over the years it was in service. I lubed the bearings and polished up the roller shafts as they were not worn and now it seems to be as good as new. Instead of buying an interface adapter, I broke out the trusty Volt meter and traced the routes on an old Microsoft ball mouse and interfaced the track ball to the mouse board and it works great!! I found a thread here on the Nasty HDD Spinner and built my own using a USB ball mouse and temporarily mounted it in a plastic case to make sure it worked good and it did! In fact, my oldest son and I must have played Tempest for 2 hours straight! Ahh It's great to be a kid again!!!
I will be using the DIY joysyick and button kit and the interface card from X-Arcade and building the control panel out of MDF. I'm not sure what to do about a monitor bezel and was thinking of using a piece of thin lexan and painting outer edges black to conceal the monitor. Any ideas here would be great! Not only will this be may gaming machine but I decided to also make this a Jukebox and Karaoke machine as well so this machine will be a complete multimedia toy.
Here are a few pics of what I have done so far. I will keep posting as I make progress and I'm sure I will have questions along the way as from what I have seen in this forum, everyone here seems to be very knowledgeable.
Thanks for reading along and checking out my first build!
Shawn
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Topic: Newbies First Mame Machine build! (Read 6446 times)
