Some Mame and Hyperspin n00bish queries

touchwood wrote: »

Hey guys, was searching around the net for some clues on building an arcade cabinet, my 14 yr old son came up with the idea as a project for school........am I out of my depth or will I be able to get it done by reading about it on sites like boards etc?

You'll get it done with advice off of a few good places on the net. It's not difficult, just time consuming, and it can be pricey depending on the setup you want.

There are a few key parts to building one. The cab itself can be made from scratch (time consuming but rewarding), a renovation/restoration of an actual cab, or made from a commercially available flatpack kit (good if you're short of time or don't like woodworking, but can be pricey to buy). Links below.

The control panel, basically your joystick, buttons, etc, and the panel they are mounted into. Needs to be made to spec with hole saws and carefully planned and measured, (unless you're buying a flatpack kit). Be careful to plan for a sufficient number of buttons & sticks to play all the games you and your son love and to give yourself flexibility, but not so many buttons and controls that you mess up the look of it.

The interface. As posted, this is a circuit board that takes the button presses and joystick movements on your control panel and translates them into ordinary keyboard presses that windows uses to control your games. You wire up your buttons to it (it's easy, no soldering needed) and it connects to your PC via USB. One setup of your buttons and you're away, no need to touch it again. Again, as posted, look at the ultimarc stuff for this. Ipac, Minipac, Jpac, etc. They are all rock solid boards, and miles ahead of anything else on offer in the market. Ultimarc's products are almost the de-facto choice if you're building a cab, the vast majority of home built cabs use their stuff.

The PC. Usually a low end PC will do, depending on the software you need (see below) but some software like certain front-ends etc need a beefier machine or graphics card. Planing what you need and getting the right spec is important here. Very often the games, especially any of the classic arcade or console games up to year 2000 or so will run on low-end P4 XP or even win98 machines with 1-2gb of ram, but when you want to play newer console games, or get into front-ends with fancy graphical effects, you'll need a machine with more clout. You can go with a CRT or TFT screen or you can get an arcade monitor for an authentic look and feel, but these are more expensive, need more custom components, and need more work and upkeep. If you're new to all this, a half decent TFT or TV is a good bet, and if you pick your software well you can get away with a cheap second hand machine and monitor off adverts.ie or somewhere like that for €100-150.

The software. You need emulators and roms. Emulators like mame, zsnes, gens, nesticle, project64 etc will run roms from specific systems. These are basically dumps of the info on the original game boards or cartridges. It's against boards.ie (and most other websites) rules to discuss where to get these, as there are legal and copyright issues involved, but suffice to say uTorrent is your friend. If you don't know what that means, google it.

Be aware that from a legal standpoint, private, non-commercial users downloading roms for games they don't own is untested and as far as i know still completely unchallenged by any copyright holders, but it is still technically illegal. Think of it along the same lines as the whole "taping songs off the radio" scandal of the 80's, if you're old enough to remember that . You may not get into a lot of hot water for it, but you should know where you stand before you begin, especially as you mentioned your cab is going to be a school project for your son. It may or may not be something you want to show off for his final year evaluation or whatever, based on the legal technicalities involved, so maybe talk to his teacher before you put a lot of money into it, just to cover yourselves.

Also on software, there are a number of other key bits that will save you a lot of hassle and get a better finished product out of if you know about them in advance, so here goes:

A frontend. This is a piece of software that's designed to run multiple different emulators all as part of one central interface, and launch and exit them and their games seamlessly. There are lots of them around, the majority of them are free, but they all require different amounts of work and system resources to get them working properly.
Hyperspin is my favourite, and certainly the most beautiful, but it needs a decent enough PC and is a LOT of work to set up, especially if you're new to this. GameEx, Mala, or Maximus arcade are other good options, GameEx gets good reviews, and is supposed to be easy to set up, Maximus arcade likewise, but it's not free, it costs $20-30 i think to download it.

A sheller. This is a bit of software that hides the windows operating system in your machine, and makes it boot straight into your frontend or favourite emulator on startup instead. it's essential for giving your machine the finished "feel of an arcade cabinet" and not a computer. Read up on them, there are a few available, but instantsheller.exe is probably the best. It's easy to use, is completely reversible at a click of a button, and works great, but it needs windowsXP service pack 3 or higher, don't use service pack 2 or 1 or it won't work, and for the love of god don't use Windows Vista....not just for arcade games, for anything....ever.

There's loads more to know, this is just the basics, but check out the links below as a good place to start, as well as the websites for all the software i mentioned. Many of them have useful forums on them. Just introduce yourself as a newbie to the cab building scene, and you'll be surprised how helpful people will be. We've all been there.

Gremlin solutions: A UK based supplier of everything you need to build a cab, from flatpack cab kits to interfaces, panels, buttons, and all the other bits and bobs. Very helpful and friendly, and trustworthy to deal with. A good place to get your hardware for your build without having to pay import duty from outside the EU.

BYOAC: The original cab building resource site. It's years old now (and looks it) but it was the first site dedicated to cab building, and has an enormous amount of info and pics on everything to do with the topic, including newbie guides and pics of a lot of projects to take inspiration and ideas from.

MAME: The program that started it all. Multiple arcade machine emulator. This program made the arcade game cabinet home build scene a reality. Lots of good info and downloads.

Hope this helps to get you started. Incidentally, here's a thread with some pics of my most recent cab build. It's a space-friendly bartop cab. It took about 3 months on and off to get it fully finished, but i could have done it faster if i had had a straight run at it. Life just kept getting in the way...lol.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=77505386&postcount=1

Good luck!

touchwood wrote: »

Thanks guys, looking forward to getting started...... I'll post pics as I'm going along with it.

Start a build thread dedicated to your project and post back here with a link to it. As a lurker it's nice to watch these things take shape over a few months, and it's also a great way for you to ask specific questions or look for advice as things come up.