No Raiden II yet = Thanks for the info.

What kind of options? I'm just happy that MAME plays them at the same speed and framerate as the arcades as far as I can tell. That's all I need.

How large of a board do you think this would be?
How easy is it to wire the buttons and the joystick, do you connect it to the i-Pac or what?

I think i'm ready for a hobby after I graduate.

I've d/l Kawaks and followed every direction in the FAQ - for the life of me, I cannot get it to recognize any ROM I d/l. I have made sure I directed the paths properly and renamed the ROMS correctly. Am I missing something obvious?

I haven't built one yet (I bought an X-Arcade which fit perfectly into an old Nintendo cab I refurbished) but I'm going to build a 4 player one as soon as we buy a house next year.

The buttons and joysticks all connect to the i-pac, which is the interface that connects directly to the computer. All the wiring is done with connectors, so there's no soldering involved.

Check my pics on the front page and the www.ultimarc.com website for instructions on wiring. It is very easy to do.

Okay, I found the place that hosts images.... here's a few shots of the cabinet I built last year:



I got the cabinet from rec.games.video.arcade.marketplace... this guy was just going to trash this old Nintendo cabinet and dvdtalk user sundog and I rescued it from the landfill for free. The X-Arcade fit right into the cabinet (with a little help from a jigsaw) and I bought the working coin slots from happcontrols.com. There's a dreamcast in there and when I pick up Capcom vs. SNK for the X-Box I'll be playing it Live on that puppy too.


The monitor is a flatscreen Panasonic 20" TV so I'm using S-Video out from the computer. A standard TV with S-Video is the best way to go because computer monitors have too high a resolution and old arcade monitors have enough voltage to kill.

I spent about $1100 on it, but $300 was for the TV, $500 was for the 1Ghz PC and $200 was for the X-Arcade. The DK Jr. marquee I got from eBay for $15.



The thing that I love most about the cab I used was that it's small enough to fit nicely in the closet. I live in a cozy 2BR apartment so if you say "I don't have the space to build one" that's not a valid excuse!

well, this thread has given me serious fever... i got the fever a while back, but didn't really do much with it, with the exception of building a living room pc and buying a hotrod joystick... well, i think it may be time to build...

i wanna do a 4-player machine.. i've been looking around a lot, trying to generate some ideas... so far, this is the coolest thing i've found:

http://www.cybercoma.com/supercade/

that control panel is SICK! though i don't think i'd go that far. i like his bottom layer, and imo, the second tier kinds gets in the way of the trackball...

i'm gettin psyched... time to buy some parts... and find somewhere to do this project.

Be careful though, the 8 way joysticks make games like PacMan hard to control. My cab (pictured above) has one 4 way joystick above one of the 8 way joysticks but uses the same inputs. It's quite useful for games that don't need the 8 way.

You're off a little bit:

IPAC 4 player is $69
Shipping is $12

You could get Happs Super joysticks (currently on sale for $8 each). A lot of people like those better than the competitions.

You'd also have to have the proper tools - a drill and hand saw at the minimum. A router and jigsaw sure help.

Right, that was a typo on my part. I was looking at the 2-player model. So we're closer to $200 than $150... but then again I overestimated the price on those joysticks so they cancel out I guess.

Speaking of joysticks, am I the only one who doesn't notice a difference when playing Ms. Pac-Man with the speedup cheat with an 8-way joystick vs. a 4-way?

That thing is NICE! I almost built my into a closet too, but I convinced the wife to let me move a bookshelf.

I have to do a marquee for mine. I was thinking of getting the MKII one off Ebay, but I might like to make something. I'll have to think about it.

It doesn't look like the closet door closes though...

Alas, it doesn't. My fiance allowed me to have the cabinet in the apartment on one condition... that it fit completely inside the closet. I was off in my calculations by about 5 inches. But by then it was too late MUA HA HA HA!!! She's come around though, since it doubles as a TV with a VCR and DVD... and it's funny to watch her do her Pilates and stepaerobics in front of an arcade, like some bizarre dance dance revolution game

Looks great draven. Only 20 hours? Man, wish I could have done the same in that amount of time - according to my rough calculations, mine took 55 hours, and I'm not even done yet. Still need to get the marquee working (the light and everything works, just don't have the plexiglass and banner) along with adding a coin door and a 4 way joystick - really need one for Ms. Pacman.

Again, looks great, it sure is satisfying playing games on something you built. I'm also looking to go to a 4 player layout since the keyboard encoder will support it, but I don't know if I've got the cash to build a new control panel.

Sorry I couldn't help you with the MKII problem....good luck.

My Cab for those interested:
http://www.movielocity.com/mame

WHAT? That sucks. I had planned on finishing my cab this summer with a complete Tombstones upgrade. Guess I'll have to make use of the newsgroups, although with the recent multitude of updates to MAME, it's becoming a pain

Tombstones is dead, but FreeMameRoms seems to have taken over where they left off...

Yeah, 20-25. My dad was a big help cutting the side panels. It only took about 2 hours to cut everything out, and another hour or so to assemble. So everything else was just painting and wiring.

And I'm certainly not "done" either. I should have called this thread "MAME Cabinet: FUNCTIONING!"

I want to hide the speakers up in the top, get a marquee going (We have a vinyl cutter at work that accepts Illustrator documents. I'm going to do some custom thing with lights.) Clean up the underside and get the keyboard to trundle out. So it'll take me awhile to actually COMPLETE it

Rock on wid yo bad self.

i was planning on picking these up:

http://www.oscarcontrols.com/index_joystick.htm

saw them on a few example CP's, and they look good... i may also dedicate a 4-way stick for those games as well..

In planning these things in my head as I like to do, I've come up with the following button layout...
...with the buttons being packed a little closer together, but you get the idea I think.

This would be the the optimal layout I think for the Street Fighter series and the Mortal Kombat series, the two series that seem to be the hardest to get right. I thought about having 4 buttons along the top row for Neo Geo games, but so few Neo Geo games use all 4 buttons that it probably isn't worth it, plus that would put the total number of buttons per player to 9 which I think is beyond the ipac's limits (?).

How doable is this layout using the "simple' tools like the ipac and so forth. Is there a preferred joystick (4-way or 8-way) to use for most games or is there some tradeoff between any of the happ models?

Another quick question, how does the ipac interface with the computer? I mean does it translate button presses to keyboard commands or something? Would it be just as easy to set the controls to run in something like RockNESX or zSNES as well, or is it pretty specialized to MAME applications?

...and if it interfaces using keyboard commands, is there a limit to the number of simultaneous button presses?

Your keyboard plugs into the ipac, and a cable runs from the ipac into the keyboard port.

It translates button presses into keyboard keys. It works well with any software that can work with key presses (and you can program it).

If I remember right, it can handle something like 16 key presses at once.

You can still get them from mame.dk too. You just have to register first.

Hey Rob V, It depends on if you are trying to play NeoGeo or CPS1/2 games. CPS games need to have the XORS included, to check these run Winkawaks audit feature and see which files you need. For neo-geo games you have to have the Bios file also some may have to be redumped (check the winkawaks downloads page) because they were formatted for Neorage.

If you need further help or you need to find a place that has the complete games with XORS, e-mail me. don't want to get this thread locked.

Guys, what cards are you using for video to the TV. I tried my GeForce 2 today with S-Video and it looked pretty crappy. Would it be better to go with a PC monitor in a cabinet rather than a TV?