Mame in cab thread. Frontends, gamelists, configuration etc.

[cools]

The PSU is the fiddly part. Motherboard can be done with just PCB feet, HDDs and optical drives have brackets you can buy to screw in - or just use some aluminium angle cut and drilled to fit

[invzim]

Why mount it on a MDF plate? My impression is that most the people do this because they think it's cool, and try to make the PC look like something other than a PC. If I didn't power my mame stuff directly form the cab via JVS/JAMMA, I would rather somwhow mount the JAMMA connector to a standard PC case.

[Wonderdog]

I've used builders band (comes in a big roll from screwfix) successfully in the past.

#Wonderdog

[mufunyo]

Why mount it on a MDF plate? My impression is that most the people do this because they think it's cool, and try to make the PC look like something other than a PC. If I didn't power my mame stuff directly form the cab via JVS/JAMMA, I would rather somwhow mount the JAMMA connector to a standard PC case.

You can get a Zirco dAX case, saw off the drive bays, cover the gaping hole with the excess side panel metal, mount the HDD to the side panel, strip out the PSU and replace it with a metal plate with JVS power connectors mounted in it. Lindbergh-style MAME box go If you want to go for aesthetics you could even mount a JVS-PAC to a PCI slot bracket and connect it to a USB header on the motherboard internally .

[Mellor]

I did as Cools suggested. But for the PSU I just drilled 2 holes above and below the PSU and passed through cable ties to hold it to the MDF. Saved drilling the PSU casing and having to part it etc..

[penrhos]

You can do it several ways but the PSU is always the trickyest bit.

1) Use a 3.5 > 5 1/4 drive adapter and screw that to the board to mount the drive & Arcade PCB feet to mount the PCB

2) mark the position of the mounting holes on the board, drill holes through and use long bolts to fasten them in place from behind (fit 5mm plastic spacers behind the PCB for clearence).

The PSU - I usually use some aluminium strips and make a cradle to clamp the PSU down to the board, wrap several layers of tape over the corners to prevent slipping.

[retromax]

In the only cab that I didn't use the full pc case (ChaseHQ) I decided to dismantle an old pc case by drilling out the rivits, then I just screwed the metal panel that mounts the motherboard to a piece of mdf and mounted my motherboard to that as you would normally mount it into a case. The hdd and the power supply I held in place by using small angled brackets that came from my sons meccano set.

[gargoyle67]

I thought about doing this but it's just so much easier to have a nice small form factor PC inside the cab and pull it when you need to set up\change emus, Still nice neat job

[Sobriquet]

No-one has mentioned interference. If it's not in a shielded case then the leakage will interfere with your wi-fi reception (or at least it seems to in my case, or lack of case).
I mounted a mini-iTX board on PCB feet, alongside a J-PAC and a 2.5"->3.5" HDD mounting bay intended for cooling SSDs.
Haven't figured out what to do with the PSU yet, it just sits on the bottom.

did it for form factor and air-flow, as well as thinking it would look cool Beginning to have second thoughts though.

[emphatic]

I have a very small Fujitsu Siemens tower style computer I got for £35 as my dedicated MAME box. It's so small that it actually fits BEHIND the MDF board in an EGRET II/III cabinet. If I were to build a new one, I'd try to score a broken NAOMI mobo and use that as a chassis. Would look pretty cool.

[matt5cott]

Atoms are good for this, the little internal PSUs that come with it is easy to fit onto the board with PCB feet.

http://www.chasethedevil.co.uk/copperma ... 082635.jpg

The above was the first old school atom, the new ones are faster and probably better suited.

[gargoyle67]

Yeah I though about using an Atom but even the newer ones seem under powered

[dieKatze88]

No-one has mentioned interference. If it's not in a shielded case then the leakage will interfere with your wi-fi reception (or at least it seems to in my case, or lack of case).
I mounted a mini-iTX board on PCB feet, alongside a J-PAC and a 2.5"->3.5" HDD mounting bay intended for cooling SSDs.
Haven't figured out what to do with the PSU yet, it just sits on the bottom.

did it for form factor and air-flow, as well as thinking it would look cool Beginning to have second thoughts though.

I was about to mention this. I have a Gateway E-Series case that once I get the **** cut out of it, I'm going to install a Core 2 in it, and perma-mount my JVS-PAC and such in it. I'm even thinking about removing the PSU and installing JVS wiring, so its fully plug and play.

Atom isn't sufficient for MAME really, and most Atom motherboards don't have PCI-E of any flavor so you can attach an ATI video card (As they are by far the most receptive to use with Soft15khz).

Get a Core 2 Based Celeron and upgrade with an older Core 2 chip bought from Ebay or something.

I should really design something for this...

[dj_johnnyg]

Why mount it on a MDF plate? My impression is that most the people do this because they think it's cool, and try to make the PC look like something other than a PC. If I didn't power my mame stuff directly form the cab via JVS/JAMMA, I would rather somwhow mount the JAMMA connector to a standard PC case.

What Mobo/CPU you using?

The +12V on the SUN PSUs isn't the highest.

John

[strontium]

Hey PubJoe, just wanted to say been following this thread for a while and your layout has got to be one of the best I have seen. Is there any chance of getting the theme of you if I PM you my email. I would modify it a bit so as not to completely pirate you but it would at least give me a great start to getting something that I was pleased with.

On a side note I don't quite follow how I can get my game videos to play on the cabinet screen using masks etc....

Oh and I have to agree this hobby can become seriously time consuming, I am also looking at getting MultiMame configured which is completely twisting my melon at the moment ha ha....

Nice one

S

[pubjoe]

Hi mate. It is completely awesome isn't it.

Thank you, it'd be my pleasure to send you the layout. I haven't touched it for a while though and it might be a bit of a mission getting onto the mame box as I temporarily borrowed the graphics card out of it. So please excuse me if I take a while getting it to you.

I can send you the layout files, but one of the things that makes my layout what it is are the modified video files - not sure on the best way to go about that - they're a couple of GB in size so emailing is out of the question and it's been so long that I can't remember what I did well enough to give decent instructions.

I'll post up again in the nearish future when I have something sorted.

[strontium]

Hey PubJoe, that's really cool of you I will PM you my email. I have been working on a theme the last couple of days when I get a few secs spare in photoshop.

It really helped using the wire frame for the candy that you posted up.

To be honest with you it's the video bit that is really making me scratch my head. If you do get any thoughts on that one let me know. I have just downloaded all the latest video files from emumovies in .mp4 they just need masking and transforming so they are slanted. I presume you did all that in Virtualdub as there does not seem to be any masking capabilities in MALA apart from transparency.

Any ways thanks again sending that PM now with my email

Strontium

[pubjoe]

Virtuadub yeah. I should have the project file and templates saved somewhere. There are two, one for horizontal videos and one for vertical, and I ran a seperate batch job for each. Fortunately, virtuadub magically distorts any size starting video to the same sized output and then applies them to the mask, so the fact that the videos are all different resolutions didn't matter. I did have to seperate the videos into 'horizontal' and 'vertical' folders though - and I can't remember how I did this ...I'm sure that there was a trick which avoided having to select them all individually, but I can't remember now.

There is one adjustment you might have to make before you go and run the virtuadub job. The background to the videos is not flat black, I have a very slight gradients in the background which was captured along with the Mai image. It lines up on my theme ok, but as your theme is different, you may want to change this - the template image will have to be adjusted to black before you run the virtuadub job... Then again, on a CRT it is really hard to tell - on mine it is anyway - but on an LCD, you can see the dark background blobs a lot more clearly. Thinking back, it would have been much tidier if I had just faded that area of the background image to 000000 black in the first place.

[strontium]

Thanks for that update Pubjoe, I mainly use Linux at home but can get a windows box if I have to use virtuadub. One quick question when you say distort the image do you actually mean twist it (kinda like the free transform tool in Photoshop). I get who I can use a mask to block out the bits I don't want showing but for the life of me I can not find any documentation oline to do with distorting / transforming video.

The search will continue though as i'm really close to getting this project completed.

A second question kinda not related but I think I have seen you mention this somewhere before is about Multimame. I have created the two default filters and pointed them to my emulator and roms. For some reason Mame is still playing everything

Do you know any way of debugging this or finding out why it is using mame and not Zinc. Sorry about all these questions it just seems to me you may have been through all these similar problems in the past

Thanks

Strontium

[tetsujin]

Right, I am going to keep this quick and simple.

If I have an Astro City, limited money and PC/IT knowledge, how easy is it to build a decent spec PC that would work in the cab?

What do I need?

What will be the total cost?


Basically, I want to play a lot of games I cant afford, find or am willing to make the investment in the hardware to play them.