Flack

I've got one, but it's a bit bigger than those.

I also know the unit is prone to blowing up if you have batteries in it whan you hook up external power, so beware.

Were you using an older X1541 cable, or a newer XE1541 one? I had an older one and had similar problems. My XE1541 cable has worked on pretty much every machine I've tried except for my laptop.

I was at Staples earlier and they had an entire row of $30 cables (including the firewire cable I needed). If $30 sounds really high, I'd get into the business of making and selling cables!

I've picked up three working drives (under $2 each) over the past month. You need to hit more thrifts! There are XE1541 cables on eBay right now. You can usually find them for $30 or so which to me wouldn't be worth the frustration and time spent making one. People's skills differ, so YMMV of course. Star Commander works great for me ... in DOS. I've still got an old dual boot Win98 machine around for just these types of old projects. The same machine has my old Snazzi Dazzle that they refuse to release Win2k drivers for. 64DD works great in DOS mode as well. I just wish they would hurry up and finish that C=VGA box, so I could add my 64 to my KVM system.

Cool, sounds like you're enjoying it! Man, I didn't remember it being that much fun ... is it for sale?

Mom?

Man, great job!!! It always tickles me that these programmers are always surprised when they find out people are still playing their games. I gave Impossible Mission a spin just the other night for a project I'm working on. Still as fun, 20 years later.

This is a true story that really happened to me. When I was 16 years old I worked at Mazzio's, a local pizza chain restaurant. By not being a complete idiot (or at the very least by being SEMI-responsible) I was promoted to "shift manager". Besides working school nights, I also ran the weekend day shift. On the weekends, there was only one employee who came in earlier than I did, a nice lady named Edna who was probably 55 years old or so. She came in around 8 in the morning on the weekends and started making the dough. For those who aren't familiar with the pizza industry, dough must be mixed and then left to "proof" for a couple of hours before it's ready to be used. Edna came in and started making the dough, and I usually came in shortly afterwards, some time between 8 AM and 8:30 AM. One Friday night, our "videogame" guy came by to remove some of our old games and drop off some new ones. It just so happened that I was in charge that Friday night, so after we were all done with our closing duties we all fixed ourselves a beer or two (hey, that's what happens when you leave a 16 year old in charge) and played videogames and pinball into the wee hours of the night. One of the games the guy had dropped off was a "Black Knight" pinball machine. For those who have never been around one, it's an extremely chatty pinball machine which is constantly talking, especially in attract mode. Somehow, between staying up way too late and drinking "one too many", I forgot to lock the front door of the store. This is what happened the following morning. At 8 AM, Edna showed up to Mazzio's to begin her morning dough duties. When she went to unlock the front door she found it was already unlocked. Concerned that the store had been broken into, she slowly pulled the door opened and yelled out, "hello?" to see if anyone was still in the store. There was no answer. Edna began to slowly work her way through the store, still not completely convinced that she was alone. The arcade "nook" was right next to the cash register and entrance to the kitchen. Right as Edna had just begun to relax and was standing directly next to the videogames, the pinball table announced, "I am the Black Knight. Prepare to die!" Edna apparently stopped running somewhere between Eckard's and Homeland. When I pulled up to the restaurant just a few minutes later, there were three or four police cars at the door with lights flashing, and Edna was sitting on the curb with her head in her hands. I couldn't tell if she was laughing or crying, truth be told it was probably a little of both.

http://www.robohara.com/videogames/cabs/

Hey man, great game room! You sure have a lot of classics in there! I have a (currently broken) Rock-Ola 440 jukebox as well, and need to eventually track down some manuals for it.

Okay I'm at work and that made me laugh out loud.

I picked up a complete Apple IIe system (system, two drives, and a monitor) for $1.98. If anyone knows where they're selling for $50 at, please let me know.

You're right on track man. Most of the questions you have will be answered once you roll up your sleeves and dig in. You can always put Lemon in the XP startup group, so it's the first thing that comes up -- then, no keyboard needed once you get everything set up. Lemon is also very configurable, so you can get it work with any command line emulator (so you can keep your Atari, NES, or whatever other ROMS in there as well!) The iPac has a spot to hook up to a coin door, so you can trigger the 1up button in MAME with a quarter even. Sounds like you got the groundwork laid, now it's time to jump in!

They still sell the PS/2 one, although shipping is free on the newer USB one which seems to be the way they're going. The one we got is true USB (no adapter). I did a little more digging and they admit that the USB one is intended for Windows use and doesn't always work (or work well) in DOS. That's too bad, as you can skimp by with a much slower donor machine if you decide to set it all up in DOS.

It's an Okie thing. Glad you had a good time. Hopefully next time I'll have the gameroom all finished up and we'll play a few rounds. Q*Bert is a callin' ...

One thing I've learned over the years is that games always look better in photos than they do in real life. The paint job on this cabinet is fairly sucky. We used flat black as a primer and then shiny black as a second coat. It looks okay in his living room which is already pretty dark, but if I had it to do over again I would have done a lot more paint work and preparation. When we originally painted it, we were shooting to finish the project over a weekend and so we were going for the quickest solution possible. It wouldn't take you nearly that long, as long as you stuck with it and had all the mail order parts. This one took so long because he is busy during the week and I am busy on the weekends, so it was more scheduling issues than work issues. All together, I think we spent about 40 hours on the cabinet, although now I think I could do it in half that (or, I could do a lot better job on a 40-hour cabinet). If you get serious about it, look for a SuperAuctions auction near you (some coming up in Dallas, Kansas City, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Kalamazoo). I have seen dead cabinets go for $5-$10 at the end of their auctions.

Sometimes games tell me HELTER SKELTER and KILL THE PIGGIES.

Speaking of old memories ... I live near a water park named White Water. I haven't been there in years, but I remember when I was a kid going there. Along with all the water rides, they had a small (15 or so) arcade. I remember standing in the arcade, playing Battlezone. Everytime your forearms would touch the metal control panel, you would get a warm tingling sensation, not unlike sticking your tongue on a 9 volt battery. It probably didn't help the fact that we were all soaking wet ...

Ask away ... that's the way we all learn! The iPac is an easy way to connect arcade joysticks and buttons (via wires) to a PC. Older iPacs were PS/2 connectors which I liked, the new ones are USB which is okay if you're running a Windows box but might take a little more tinkering in a DOS machine. If you are sticking a PC into a working arcade cabinet check out the J-PAC. It's just like the I-PAC except instead it hooks to a JAMMA harness, so you can use an arcade monitor with your PC as well. People have been known to hack a keyboard and do all other kinds of crazy stuff to get arcade joysticks and buttons to interface with a PC, but I for the price (under $40), the iPac will save you hours and maybe days of fiddling around, trying to get something to work.

After seeing my MAME cabinet, my friend The Stranger decided he wanted one as well. Several hundred dollars and months later, here is his the story of his cabinet. The Stranger's MAME cabinet began life as a 1976 Atari LeMans cabinet. As far as MAME cabinets go, this is one of the worst you could choose. For starters, it has a steering wheel and gas pedal on the front. It also has a sloped control panel area, for the steering wheel. This particular cabinet had mouse crap and bird's nests all through it. It was also free. The first thing we did was completely gut the cabinet. This meant removing the bezel, the marquee, the speaker ... basically anything we could unscrew and remove, we did. Here's what we ended up with -- an empty cabinet. We peeled the artwork off of one side and eventually gave up. Since the goal of this project was to finish it in a weekend, we decided to spray paint the cabinet black. By the way, the cabinet took about three months to finish, due to my busy schedule. Here's me, stuck in the cabinet. Aren't I funny. And more of me, posing by the cabinet. You can start to see why it took three months. OK DEAR GOD WE GET IT. Actually, the reason I posted this picture is so you could see one of the problems we would later face. Not only is there no conventional control panel, there's really not even a good place to build one. The inside of the cabinet was exactly two feet wide, so starting with a 2'x1' piece of wood and a goofy grin, we started drawing. Then, we started drilling. If you don't already know, button holes are 1 1/8" holes. This drill bit was less than 5 bucks at Lowes, and made the entire process really easy. Basically we just pretended we were playing video games, and then kind of guessed where we wanted the buttons. A couple of pencil marks and a few measurements later, we were drilling away. When we got done with the control panel, we went to Wal-Mart (at around 1am) and picked up a roll of marble-print shelf paper. We wrapped the control panel in it, but it didn't stick so great, so on the underside we duct taped it into place. Since the original control panel was sloped, we had to make a piece of wood to cover that too. We just cut another piece of wood, also wrapped it in the same contact paper, and stuck it into place. Here I am, pointing to it. Whee! No cabinet would be complete without side art and a bezel. Here is the side art that the Stranger found via eBay. Expensive, but completely worth it. It immediately changed the look of the cabinet. Here's me pointing at it. Here's the underside of the control panel. We used an iPac to wire everything up (SO easy ... God I would not build one any other way). Every button has one wire running to the iPac, and one common ground wire. Wiring the whole thing up would have taken less than an hour but of course we learned everything the hard way on this one. I bought the wrong kind of wire, so one night we ran up to Radio Shack and got the right kind. Half of building a MAME cabinet is the MAME half -- that is, getting your computer configured and running just right. Trust me on this one folks, it's a HECK of a lot easier to get everything working while it still looks like a computer instead of working on it when you've got it already installed into a cabinet. Since we were building a cabinet mainly to play old school games, we had to run through everything and make sure MAME was rotating the games to the left. I used LemonMAME front end, which is very easy to configure for a vertical monitor as well. Here's another shot of the MAME guts. There's the monitor, the motherboard (which unfortunately did not have an onboard sound card), the keyboard/mouse, hard drive, CD-Rom, and power supply. Here's us installing the monitor. We maintained the original slope of the original monitor. We bought a few metal L brackets, and I cut some 2x4's 2' long. Then, The Stranger held the monitor in place while I frantically screwed in the 2x4's to support the weight. In the end I think we used 4 2x4's. 2 probably would have held it, but we wanted to be super sure that this thing wouldn't move. Not only does he drill, he looks good doing it. What can I say, folks. Once we had the monitor secured, we measured the distance from the sides of the cabinet, centered it, cut little blocks of wood to hold it in the middle and screwed those into place as well. Then we shook the cabinet violently and nothing moved. Then, we danced. The original marquee light was shot so we went to Wal-Mart and bought an 18" desk light. Then I cut a piece of wood to fit and we screwed it into place. Simple. To make the bezel we went to Wal-Mart (again) and bought some black poster board. We laid the original plexiglass sheet in place, and then market on the posterboard where the monitor screen would be. Then we went into the living room and cut out the square with an exacto-knife. This MAME Cabinet is has more Wal-Mart parts and duct tape than any other one on the planet. I always like MAME cabinets to look like real arcade cabinets on the inside, so were we are mounting the motherboard to the side of the cabinet. The hard drive, CD-Rom drive, and iPac board are all duct taped into place. Mu-ha-ha-ha ... I wasn't kidding. BTW, we cut the wires that went to the motherboard for the CPU's power button, and ran them to a spare arcade button which we hid on the top of the cabinet. Works great, and looks cool Final results -- here's the machine, up and running. The picture on the screen is a custom background I made out of The Stranger's favorite arcade bezels (we used the artwork from MAME). The red/blue joysticks from Happs were a nice touch. The Stranger got the marquee from the same guy he got the side art from. Lit up from the back, it looks awesome, just like the real thing! Here's a link to the 600x800 Background, if you want to check it out or use it: mame_background.jpg Here I am, covered in saw dust, playing a little Ms. Pac-Man. --- The last thing we need to do is finish up closing up the control panel, but everything works so well at the moment we hate to mess with it.

Here's a picture of it before it left my house. Hopefully, it'll arrive in a similar looking condition on the other end.

I can't seem to find it on the web now, but I remember a story floating around the newsgroups a few years ago. Basically it was a take off of the old (fake) Snopes story about the guys moving something up to a second story window, except in this version it was a Donkey Kong cabinet (or Star Wars cabinet, or Tron cabinet or whatever game was popular at the time cabinet). The gist of the story was two guys were moving an arcade game outside a house up to the 2nd floor with a pully. I don't remember the details but one guy tied the rope to himself or something to anchor the game. Once they get the game hoisted up, the pulley breaks, sending the game crashing to the ground and then shooting the other guy way up into the air. I remember it being funny but not all the details, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't true.

The new owner of a dual slot Neo Geo cabinet! Hope it made the trip home okay. Nice meeting you today!