Day 114

 Today's been a good day. My niece Amanda has been helping me with removing the rest of the old side art and I've gotten two of the laser games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace running with the emulator Daphne working within Hyperspin. The transition was a lot easier than I thought. I just have Dragon's Lair 2 to add.

I covered the edges of the monitor in black electrical tape to better disguise it when I put in the bezel. I'm planning on getting a sheet of acrylic from Home Depot, which I will cut for the bezel and the upper marquee.  I found the two wires which light the coin return and I just need to figure out how much power to supply it in order for the coin slots to light up.

Day 112

Well, I spent a good part of last night and this morning going through each and every entry in Hyperspin under the MAME section removing bad game entries and prettying-up the ones that worked. A lot of my favorites need to be replaced and that shouldn't be any problem.  I'll post a video on YouTube when I get a chance.

Amanda was my Beta-tester. So far, everything is working, but the controller is frustrating to use under these circumstances.  Oh well. Eventually, I can get to the point where I'll have proper controls and can hide the keyboard and mouse.

I need to find a better jukebox. It's simple to use, but some features just aren't there. I may just have a program running in the background that can be controlled by the joystick and buttons. The old Winamp program might do nicely. I'll have to see if the screensaver can kick in on its own. Anyway, I digress.

Now I've got to replace the games that went bad and start adding the other emulators. I think I'll work on the Super Nintendo next. The ones that worry me are the laser games like Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Those can be huge and I'll have to see if I have enough hard drive space left. 30 Gigabytes don't go as far as they used to.

Day 109

 Part 2

I found that I could not insert the monitor while the riser was in place, so I attempted to wrestle the 50 pound monitor into the cabinet whilst placing the riser underneath. The effect of which is like trying to add a floor on a house underneath the first floor. So I asked my mother to place the riser while I held the monitor up. Almost didn't make that either, but with a bit of coaxing and swearing we managed to get them in place.


After that, I got the brackets in place to keep it from swaying about.

The result wasn't too bad after I got it where it needed to be.

From here, I put in the mini-tower and the rest of the guts.  I removed the marquee and uninstalled the speakers and put the two satellite speakers in their place.

The results weren't to shabby. I've got some work to do so I can use remote control. This way I can get rid of the keyboard and mouse altogether. After that, I'll order the arcade parts and wire them up to the mini-tower.

That should get it to an operational state. After that I'll start the process of prettying-up the cabinet with new side art, a marquee and the bezel to hide the monitor and the interior.

Day 108

After much searching and and thinking, I found a way to build a riser for my monitor to hoist it high enough in the cabinet. And I only spent $12 in wood screws (I was fresh out).


Now I just need to add the monitor and get the thing settled into place and bolted.  I'll have to wait till tomorrow at least. Too much to do this evening.

Day 80

With the new gig I've been doing at the hospital and especially the 12-hour days I've been doing, that only leaves me with one day a week to play with.

Anyway, I spent the last few free days attaching the new wheels I got to the bottom of the cabinet. I removed the existing metal feet since they were worn completely through anyway. 

Getting the cabinet to lean against the wall and propping it there with a cinder block was the fun part.  Nothing like adding an element of danger to one's work.  In my last post, I'd determined that I would use Game Launcher. The problem I encountered between then and now is that I couldn't get the jukebox or some of the other emulators to work properly.  So after much scrounging, I found a copy of Windows XP and went back to using Hyperspin. So far, it's coming along quite well. I downloaded demo videos from emumovies.com to display on the screen when you're selecting the games you want.

Now for the really fun part. Trying to figure out how to create an 8" shelf from the bottom bracket that would be strong enough to support a 50-pound monitor.  I figure eight since the distance between the bottom bracket and the top of the front black panel was 13 3/4 inches and the distance between the base of the monitor to the bottom of the screen itself was 7 inches. I allowed an inch for error. Now, what to build the shelf from. I don't want to add anymore expense than I need to. I do have several 2x4's and some plywood. So, basically what I need to build is a box that is approximately 22" deep by 25" wide by 8 inches high. Hmmmm...

Day 28

This is the third test for the best OS for the cabinet.  Windows 2000 was a bust (the no-fun version), Linux Mint was good, but the emulators are hit-or-miss, so after thinking about it, I came to realize that the time when all the emulators ran well and the OS didn't get on my nerves was Windows 98.

So after testing two 15 Gb drives I had in the garage and found both of them were totally trashed due to the master boot record being corrupted and unrecoverable, I pulled the secondary hard drive from my primary computer and used it. The nice thing was that the drive was already partitioned into three drives, the other two already being used for the games I've had on for years.

I decided on "Game Launcher", which is a nice, simple, DOS-based front end for all of the emulators and plays well with joystick control, eliminating the need for a keyboard and mouse.  After a few trial and error attempts, MAME was working with no trouble.  As soon as I have the screenshots for each game pasted, that'll be done. After that, I can add the Nintendo SNES, Vectrex, Turbografix 16, PinMAME, and so on and so forth. I'm also hoping to get the Daphne emulator running so I can incorporate the laser disc games.

Meanwhile, I found someone in Oceanside giving away two old-fashioned CRT monitors. One of them being a 19-inch, which should do nicely.  Now I just need to build the shelf for it to sit on inside the cabinet, something strong as this sucker is heavy.




This weekend, we moved the cabinet from the garage to the family room and moved the exercise equipment to the garage to set up a work-out station. Three pieces of equipment were too big for the room anyway. It went better than I expected, as the arcade cabinet weighs a ton and we had to walk it in.

Day 10

Well, today I decided to work on the guts of the cabinet. I spent the last two days trying to decide which OS I wanted to run it on. After several upgrades, several reinstalls and much desk pounding with the fist, I decided to use Linux Mint.

I used the ShuttleX case I got whilst working at SOE (thanks, DennisG). I put in a measly 20 Gb hard drive just for the environment and will put in a secondary drive for the larger games (laser disc games, etc.)

It also supported the Playstation 2 game controller I connected without any trouble. It's just temporary until I get the arcade controls later on.

Now I just gotta keep my eye on a free monitor on Craigslist (somewhere between 19 and 24 inches). With everyone trying to get rid of their CRT monitors, that shouldn't take too long.

I found a front-end for MAME that also supports other emulators as well as an mp3 jukebox. Still got a lot of work to do to stabilize this system and make it automated, but it's coming right along.