Help me with a Mame cabinet

[Tain]

hello internet

on this day, the 7th of august, two-thousand and six, God bestowed upon Tain two of these totally rockin' bad boys:





price was...

free.

A friend of mine called up, works with his dad dealing in tons of old parts. They don't get many monitors, but they had two of these they couldn't sell and were gonna trash 'em. Picked up the first one today, the other comes tomorrow or Wednesday.

I get home, praying they're RGB, hook 'em up to the arcadevga card, and blam. Excellent picture. No geometry pulsing when bright white appears. No bizarre color level compensation or whatever the hell is causing the intro of VF1 to look green on the other monitor.

I'll probably sell the one I bought... Pity.

[voltz]

I think that is a really good setup you got, I'm wondering which version of mame or frontend you're using?

Also what are you considering on that spare monitor?

[andyrose]

Dude, how big is that bitch?

I decided to use a 20" LCD for my first cab, but it's going to be dedicated mainly exclusively to fighters and shooters. I just love how easily I can rotate it for vert shooters, and how ultra crisp the lines are on 2D fighters. I plan on building an RGB cabinet for classic games, and a TV one for light gun games(I finally got all the CHD files, which means I can finally play Area 51).

[Tain]

It's 27''.

I think that is a really good setup you got, I'm wondering which version of mame or frontend you're using?

Also what are you considering on that spare monitor?

Mamewah frontend with standard Mame as well as a few other emulators (selectable menus). I'll draw a background image/skin/theme/whatever at some point, add some menu audio (up, down, start sound effects), and some other stuff eventually. I should point out that the SF Alpha 2 shot is the frontend screensaver doing a slideshow thing, which explains the (hard to notice via photo) scaling.

As for the second screen, I don't know. It'll be a backup if this one shits itself, I suppose, but I might have it hooked up to the PS2 for tate shit in the meantime.

We still need to actually start building the cabinet, amazingly. My dad's been pretty swamped with work, but we should start this week.

[Detour]

Hey Tain, how's this project going? I'd love to see some pics if it's at all possible. I get my cabinet tomorrow and am looking for a bit of inspiration

[Nomi]

We've been at school, I don't think there's been any change since last he updated (a monitor on the floor+computer with a primitive stick and button shoebox controller).

[Tain]

Yeah, it's been on hold since the beginning of the school year. And we never wound up starting the actual construction. I'm not too happy about that, but it's not a dead project.

I'm at home right now for Christmas break, so I did some software stuff. Namely, I switched frontends from MameWAH to Mala and drew a new skin. Mala allows for slightly nicer skins, configuration is totally through GUIs, and it seems like less of a headache overall. It also let me arrange stuff into a hierarchal tree instead of just "choose an emu, choose a gamelist".

One of my favorite features about it is that it can monitor a certain key for you and force the running program to quit when it's hit. That made a few previously unusable/annoying games and emulators absolutely no problem now.

Here's the new (unfinished) skin. The background's a kind of bleh scrolling checkerboard pattern that I threw in for some kind of motion. I don't know, though.





...I've since turned the blood on in Metal Slug X.

Might have superplay videos on the thing for shits and giggles.

[Detour]

That's really nice and clean looking. I might try to scam a copy of the skin when I'm up to fiddling with software, if that's cool.

[Tain]

No problem. If you wind up using Mala and have it mostly set up, I can send you the files if you want.

One thing about the skin is that it's 640x480, which causes some slightly ugly flicker on RGB monitors. I still think it works out better than MameWAH (which I had running at 640x288), though.