nef’s blog

I ordered a new motherboard, processor and fan for the MAME cabinet last week and it arrived today.

I settled on the BioStar M7VKD because it had an AGP slot, PCI slots and an ISA slot, but still supported fast processors such as the Athlon XP series. The ISA slot is the killer. Since I’m running AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU I need a DOS compatible sound card. I happen to have a few SoundBlaster 32PnP cards laying around. I also have an ATI RageIIc AGP video card.

MAME doesn’t utilize GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) so it’s all up to the CPU. That being the case, the Rage IIc is plenty of card. I went with a Duron 1.3GHz because it was cheap, runs cool… and will be fast enough to run 99% of the games I want.

To make sure the Duron stays cool, I got an Arkua 7528 HSF.

All together it was $159.00. Not too bad for a fairly fast machine. I got this stuff from NewEgg Computers. I’ve had very good luck with them on several orders now. And they don’t use UPS

I said I was running DOS, well that’s not ENTIRELY true. I’m running Windows 98SE with a bootgui=0 option. This allows me to launch the GUI and start the network connection up to copy new ROMs over.

I hate UPS. They lose things, break things, are late etc.

I ordered some things from Wico including all of the arcade buttons, trackball and a joystick. It left the Chicago area last Friday. Then today, the scheduled delivery date, the status is updated on their online tracking service to ‘exception’. EXCEPTION?!?! That doesn’t sound good. Nope. It isn’t. They seemed to have ‘damaged’ the box and some portion of my order ‘fell out’ and was ‘lost’. Well, instead of sending it to me and letting me tell them what was missing, they sent the remains to Wico. Wico won’t ship a replacement order until they account for what they get back from UPS.

My order from Happ Controls was also shipped via UPS. Amazingly it was delivered when it was supposed to have been. Unfortunately one of the three packages was a 5 foot long heavy cardboard tube. Well, UPS decided to crush the tube and bend the marquee holder inside.

On the other hand, my computer which was shipped from NewEgg via FedEx was delivered as expected, in perfect condition… as it always seems to be with FedEx. People give the US Postal service grief. I tell you one thing, they are WAAAAAYYYY better than UPS.

As previously noted, I got it for $175 from
Closeouts-USA.

Shipping was originally quoted as $80. When I used the web form it came out
to $65. So… use the web form if you’re far away from NY like me (I’m
in the Dallas, TX area)

Jim Rainbow… the owner of Closeouts USA is a pretty cool guy. He’s very
busy though and got behind on sending my order out. I placed my order on the
13th of March. After a few emails and phone calls… and mentioning I was
going to have to send Vinnie out to bust his jaw for him he managed to ship
it on March 28th.

Packaging was EXCELLENT. The cardboard box is VERY heavy and form fitted for the chassis with inserts. The trucking company got it here with no visible
damage to the box.

The monitor itself is, as stated on the web site, a refurb. Except for the
Philips sticker on the back of the tube, and the old looking ribbon cable
(that allows the adjustment POTs to be remotely located) you would think the
unit was brand new. The chassis is painted. The tube looks perfect with no
burn at all and is very bright.

The monitor is a 27″ VGA (640×480) .. apparently fixed rate… display with
a standard D-sub 15 connector to connect straight to your VGA video card.
The video input cable and the power cable are both connected to the chassis
in a semi-permanent manner. They use proprietary modular connectors, but are
wire tied to the chassis… so you could remove them, but couldn’t replace
them with longer ones etc.

The picture is very nice, bright, square, and has a nice scanline effect
similar to an arcade monitor.

The downside… I am planning on using it as a horizontal monitor. This will
allow simple use for the menus/windoze etc… let me play Quake, Half-Life,
New Doom Beta soon (connections to the inside rock) etc. The screen is
plenty big enough that vertical games still have enough screen. The problem
is when I use the hardware stretch it screws up the proportions of text and
objects. I’m using Mame32 right now. Are any of the MAME / Front-end combos
under DOS any better at the stretching?

Since the monitor appears to be a fixed frequency you have to stretch or you
end up with a little image centered on the screen.

A while back I was planning on doing a rotating monitor… but there are a
couple of reasons I don’t want to… 1) 27″ is HUGE and would require about
32″ of width to allow for rotation. My Marquee is 28″ so no go.2) The bezel
never looks right. If you rotate it with the monitor then it’s not big
enough to cover everything… and/or where it mates up with the glass
surround doesn’t look right. 3) Magnetic alignment problems… constant
degausing etc. 4) introduction of mechanical failure.

All in all… it was very much worth the $175 (~$250 with shipping). I guess
in an ideal world I’ll build two cabinets… one vert.. one horizontal. But
since this isn’t an ideal world I guess I’ll put up with some compromise.

As always, check out my site for pictures including the diminsions etc.

I picked up the finished marquee for the MAME cabinet I’m building. Clear, clean and pretty. But still had the halo / blossom effect. This was caused by the film letting too much light through in effect washing the inks out.

When I put it in front of the flourescent light I wanted to scream. This is what I worked so hard for???? OK, calm down. First I tried putting some paper, fabric and whatever else I could between the light and the marquee. It helped, but made it too dim.

The next thought was to use a blacklight to illuminate it. Blacklights aren’t THAT cheap and I doubt it would have worked. Hmmmm…. AHHHHH! The printer gave me the other marquee that he mounted on the messed up lexan. It would basically boost the contrast some and turn the brightness down if I combined them. I tested the theory by just stacking them. It worked!

To make it a little more permanent I carefully peeled the film off of the lexan. Then I used some clear auto trim and emblem adhesive about an inch from the edges to adhere the film to the back of the other film. Done. Perfect. I rock.

I decided to go with the MK64 MAME interface to control all of the buttons and joysticks. There’s a couple of reasons. The Hagstrom KE72 was too expensive and doesn’t have a shift function which means I would have to have extra buttons for menu navigation. I wasn’t comfortable the I-PAC had enough inputs and being in the UK I wasn’t too sure about the support. I know I could have hooked two of them together to get 56 inputs, but they aren’t 56 ‘pure’ inputs and there’s more work involved than I wanted. Besides, for two I would have been paying over $90 including shipping.

The MK64 has 64 inputs, a shift function and costs $63 and I didn’t have to pay shipping because Ron lives about 20 miles from my house. The support so far has been great since he customized the resitance on the LED outputs for me. The Wiring kit is very comprehensive as well. It will save me a lot of time.

I’ll post some pictures of what all I got for my $109 total in the Control Panel section of my personal page.

Well, I called and the marquee wasn’t ready yet. The guy said that because of the amount of ink etc that he wanted to let it cure over the weekend before fusing it to the lexan to make sure the end result was the best possible. Since I’m all about quality I can’t complain much. I doubt anyone would listen even if I did

Well, I went by Home Depot to buy some Lexan. While it costs more than regular Plexi, it has the advantages of UV resistance and nearly impossible to break. I can attest to the latter. The guy used the scriber to try to cut it. To make three cuts it took him almost 15 minutes. He was worn out by the end. I really felt kind of sorry for him.

Well, after Letting Home Depot take 30 minutes and $20 away from me, I headed to the printing shop.

This guy in Addison, TX (a northern suburb of Dallas) rocks! His shop is called Express Signs and Graphics. He’s printing my image at 300dpi on a specialty backlit film with full edge bleed. Then he’s using a fusing process which bonds the film to the Lexan. It comes out looking like screen printing… only smoother blending of colors.

More later