First project, bartop - Only took me two years to post it

[Ozzy_98]

After wanting one for a while, in the winter of ’08 I broke down and bought the first parts for a Mame cab.  Since that time, except for the actual wood of the cab, not one piece has remained the same as when I first put it on, and even some of the wood pieces (Control panel, front and top) have been replaced.

Since I’m starting the blog well after the project started, I’m still going to try to keep the posts “in order”.  I have some old posts from an old forum, so I’ll be using that for the first few blog post.

Overview
I decided to go with a bar top model for the first cab, and it’s worked out very well.  I first used a 15″ CRT, but have moved on to a 17″ LCD.  Since the control panel isn’t as deep as a full sized cab, you stand somewhat closer to the screen, so the 17″ LCD seems MUCH larger then a 19″ or 21″ standard arcade machine.  The cab itself was pre cut and used cam screws, like a piece of Ikea plywood.  It has a programmable analog joystick, 9 “action” buttons, 6 “pinball” buttons, 2 start buttons and two insert coin buttons.  Buttons seem like overkill for many, but they all have uses, and not those “Let’s cover the panel with admin buttons” bs some people do.  I have 8 buttons in 2 rows “street fighter” style, only real reason I have 8 and not 6 is for PSX games, 4 face buttons, and 4 shoulder buttons.  The 9th button is the “run” button.  If you played Mortal Kombat much, you would know the button, but it also forms a “neo-geo” style button set up.  I’ll go more in depth on the controll panel in a later post, and why I wanted 11 action buttons, not 9.

The control panel also has a spinner that doubles as a steering wheel thanks to a removable 5″ wheel.  To add even more fun, the analog stick can be used as gas, but this is something that I’m still working on for a setup.  I first used gas as Y and brake on X axis, but discovered the brake never fully turned off.  I think I had it working well in Outrunners for a while but then stopped working on the project for a while, and lost the configs.

A future expansion for this cab is two player functionality.  For those who know a bit about networking, they key to this is a 66 block and amphenol cable.  For those who do not know what these are, an amphenol cable is a 25-pair cable (50 total wires) and a 66-block is a punch-down block to connect wires to the cable with ease.  The project works like this: Buy a second cab, do the artwork, add monitor, add speakers, a new IPac and controls.  I will not, however, add a computer.  The new machine, called the “secondary” cab, will have a 66 block and a longer amphenol cable with a male adapter.  This 66 block will use 15 wires running to the monitor, 10 for 2 dedicated USB lines from the host, and 3 wires for audio, total of 28 of the total 50 wires used.  On the “master” cab, there’s a 66 block on there with a much shorter female cable.  There’s also a frame buffer inside the cab, think of it as a VGA video splitter.  The end result is the second cab mirrors the first cab’s screen, and offers controls for player 2.

Here's some out of date pics, I'm now using a 17" CRT monitor.  I've also changed the center buttons on the front panel to nova-gem coin buttons.


I'll try to get more pics soon.  I've got more info on it over at my blog in http://rhwiii.info/blog/category/mame-cab/ Please note it's not exactly work-friendly language in all the posts.  And if the comments seem strange to you, another hobby of mine is editing the posts of spammers for fun.  The bold + italic text is mine.

[MikeyMerse]

I like the idea of using the amphenol cable. Instead of tailing the female cable connector from the original cab, you should try to mount it flush (much sexier).

Great work on the bartop, are you planning on doing the second one from scratch?

[cmoses]

Looks good.  I have considered doing a bartop once I have my full size done.  I have a couple of questions I am hoping you can answer.

1. You mentioned that the cab was a kit, where did you get it, what are you overall thoughts on it, quality, build, etc.  You mentioned you changed some of teh wood pieces?
2. Is your spinner the Turbo Twist 2, with the 5" mini racing wheel?  The last item I am going to add to my cab is a spinner, probably the TT2 and a 5" mini racing wheel.  How is do you like this setup?  Easy to swap out the wheel and spinner?  Does the wheel enhance the experience or is playing with the spinner almost as good?  What spinner top did you go with?
3. The spacing looks a little wide on your buttons, was that intentional?  Did you consider a more ergonomic layout, slight curve?

Please post more pictures.

Thanks

[njay]

Sweet cab, do you have plans for this? i want to build one but i am not handy with wood , and my shop requires plans for it... thanks

[Ozzy_98]

I like the idea of using the amphenol cable. Instead of tailing the female cable connector from the original cab, you should try to mount it flush (much sexier).

But that would be less lazy!

Actually the problem I run into is I do not want to mar the sides, they're completely covered with the graphic sticker (No edges).  And the entire back comes off, it isn't hinged, so if I mount the connector there, it'll pull away when I remove the back.  So my plan is to just let it hang out the same hole as the AC cord.

Great work on the bartop, are you planning on doing the second one from scratch?

No, just cause I want them to look matched.  First from all scratch project I do arcade wise will be a pinball table.  I think.  Who knows what my mood will be.

You mentioned that the cab was a kit, where did you get it, what are you overall thoughts on it, quality, build, etc.  You mentioned you changed some of teh wood pieces?

It's from Mameroom\north coast customs, it's a great piece.  It uses cam screws ,that seems weird, but has worked out really well for me, especially when you're still in the "Hey let's try this" phase.  I redid the controll panel, and I have a new piece for the front piece, other than that it's pretty much adding holes for the power switch and moar buttons. 

Is your spinner the Turbo Twist 2, with the 5" mini racing wheel?  The last item I am going to add to my cab is a spinner, probably the TT2 and a 5" mini racing wheel.  How is do you like this setup?  Easy to swap out the wheel and spinner?  Does the wheel enhance the experience or is playing with the spinner almost as good?  What spinner top did you go with?

  Yep, TT2 and 5" wheel.  The spinner uses a set screw, so what I ended up doing was setting the set screw part-way, so you can still just pull the spinner off.  The Wheel doesn't need a set screw, it stays put.  I used the default spinner, but honestly I almost always use the wheel.  I generally only use the spinner for looks when I play fighers or psx, when I need all 8 buttons.  Overall very easy to use, it shows up as a mouse.  So think about this: This is a mose for left\right.  Doom also uses a mouse to turn left\right.  Map the joystick for forward\back\strafe, and I use the yellow run button to fire.  Got me some doom arcade!

The spacing looks a little wide on your buttons, was that intentional?  Did you consider a more ergonomic layout, slight curve?

Yep. Big hands.  And I HATE curved layouts, too easy for me to hit other buttons.

Sweet cab, do you have plans for this? i want to build one but i am not handy with wood , and my shop requires plans for it... thanks

I'm pretty sure north coast sells plans for it besides the kits.

[Ozzy_98]

Thought I'd talk about the trick I did for my console roms.  When it comes to console rom sets on a Mame cab, you have a few different ways of doing it. The issue is that there’s so many copies of roms in each set, and not just roms from different countries, but bad dumps, over dumps, hacks and translations. Many people just toss the US versions of the roms on there and be done with it, while others toss the whole set in there, so you end up with a billion roms to sort through.

Goodmerge is a nice program that takes all of your clone roms, and puts them together in one solid archive, so you have just one single file for all roms, and reduced the total space used for rom sets tremendously (Like 1 gig down to 250 megs).

The problem with goodmerge is that almost nothing uses it natively, even less so when using 7z. I needed the front end to “unmerge” the roms for me, and give me a menu for the games. So I made a program to do just that:



How the program works is you place the application in the emulator’s folder, and point the front end at the application.  The application has three other files with it, a copy os the command line version of 7z, an ini file that tells it the path to the emulator and if it should pass the full path or not, and a third file that you place the types of roms to look for, such as *.bin and *.smc.  I separated these two ini files just to make it simpler to use for looking for more roms.  When you pick the game from the front end, it copies the .7z file to a temp directory, un-7z’s it, and list all roms matching the pre-defined filters for that instance, for example *.smc.  Once you pick the rom, it sends it to the emulator, so in a sense it’s a front end inside a front end.  One thing I want to add is a “Last-5″ and “Most used” option.  While most roms un-7z quick, some, such as N64, are a bit slower to decompress.  I also used to have the roms on a network share, so it had to copy the 7z file over the network, decompress it, then show the list.  The last 5 option would be, rather than delete the uncompressed roms, rename the folder Last-1.  If there already was a Last-1, rename it Last-2, and if there was a Last-2, name it Last-3, repeating up to Last-5, where you delete the old Last-5 and change Last-4 to Last-5.  It uses up some more space, but for some systems it can speed up reloading games.  Same with most used, it needs an ini of how many times each rom set was used, and keep a copy of the top 5 or 10 or so.

Visually the program is basic.  It’s a maximized form with a black background, alpha-blended with a value of 0 set on a timer.  Soon as it’s called it raises the value of the alpha-blend slowly up to about 240, for a fade in look.  I used to have “drop shadows” on the text, first write it with one color, then write the text over top it again in a different, with a slightly off-set x\y value.  This just made it harder to read, so I dropped it.

One thing I wanted this front end to do, hide the “crap” roms.  Sure, I could go in, and remove all the crap roms from my sets to begin with, but that means, un7z all roms, delete the Bs and Os and Translations to languages other than English, then goodmerge them all over again, a lot of time spent and no HDD space saved.  Might as well filter them at the front-end level, so I did.  By default it hides bad and over dump roms, and has a clean up button, button 3 on the joystick.  Pressing button three causes a lot more roms to be hid, such as hacks and translations, so you should only have a few options, the best ones, yet if you wanted to play a hacked rom, say the Zelda hack Outlands, you can.



Input is quick and dirty on the program, and one of the reasons I’ve not “released” it yet, since not every setup could use it right now.  The joystick up\down moves through the list of games, button 1 selects the game, button 2 exits the menu (returns to the front end).  Button 3 is the clean up button to drop the hacks and translations.  If I get to a point where it’s usable to the masses and not so cryptic that only I can use it, I’ll upload it to my site with a link. I also want to work on modifying the program so it forces the emulator to be top window and active, every now and then the emulators will "stick" and not show up.  This is normally caused by issues in mamewah though, I think I need to tweak the timing on my video thumbs.

And all the current info for my project is over at http://rhwiii.info/blog/category/mame-cab/