This was for a friend of mine who wanted a MAME cabinet. It was not
my cabinet, I cant fit another cab in my apartment. It is a
conversion of a Neo Geo cabinet. The Neo Geo cab was a good choice because the Neo Geo
cabinets were pretty generic to begin with so no big deal to chop one up. It
also had a non working tetris system in it. I dont see tetris being very
popular today and the power supply was dead anyway. I tried one of
the IPac controllers from ultimarc.com on this project for a 2 player system.
It is very nice and much easier than a keyboard hack. Also much cheaper
than the hagstrom decoders. The pdf manual did not give a pinout
so it was not clear which SW1 was player 1 and which SW1 was player 2 so
I wired up as a best guess and it was backwards. Fortunately the keys
can be easily reprogrammed in software so I changed the profile and did not have to rewire
anything. It also has a 'shift' key which lets you change the button
function to another function. This is great if you do not want
extra buttons on the cp for tab/pause/F3reset/etc but still need those functions.
I can see this being really useful if someone had multiple control panels, just replace
the shift momentary button with a toggle switch and you can use the same ipac
while switching out entire control panels for stargate and robotron for example.
One problem I noticed with the ipac is that they bios does not support
repeat when a key is pressed. This is annoying when trying to scroll
through the game listings and nothing happens.
The monitor was replaced with a vga capable arcade monitor. It worked quite
well but I had to turn the brightness down to zero even with a smoked glass
cover over it.
There was a place in the middle of the cabinet where I could fit
a marquee, instead of at the top like most cabinets. There was no room behind it
so I bought one of those computer case, no heat, lights made bywww.thermaltake.com to put behind a
marquee and give an eerie blue glow. I got the idea when looking over
ebay marquee auctions and a mame marquee was shown with a blacklight
behind it which is something I had not thought of before but it looked cool.
I could have also used some of the new high output LED's available from radio
shack or similar companies for this space.
The before's
There were no lights behind the coin slots. I like lights illuminating my coin
slots so I picked up some 6v lamps at radio scrap and found an 11vac power
converter. Using the converter meant I did not have to steal 12v out of the PC.
Speakers were mounted but not used like this, a plug wire was run to the existing mono speaker.
