sairuk's cabinets

Introduction

This is a quick page to show my arcade collection and cabinets. I picked up 2 LAI cabinets with 4 pcbs after 4 years of chasing (hoping/pleading) a guy who had them buried in the back of his warehouse. I finally recieved the call a few months ago and instantly organised to pick them up with part payment down. Both cabinets were in fantastic condition, preserved by the thick skin of dust no doubt. The Puzzle Bobble Marqueed cabinets power supply was dead, so that cabinet didn't run and the Soul Edge machines coin mech. was missing, otherwise there was nothing astray on the cabinets. See below


The cabinets once i got them home

Here is a list of what I received with the two cabinets

Total Cost: $350AUD


A simple shot of the Super Volleyball PCB

My Collection thus far includes


My Collection Begins

Creating the MAME Cabinet - Intro[dribble]duction

Feel free to ignore this section as some facts may be BS

Mame, what a beautiful thing, all the classics you know and love, being played on the latest technology; but what do you do when that's not enough? Hell get a couple of cabinets with REAL arcade monitors and convert them to play mame of course. As close as you can get to the real thing. Of course if your going to trouble of making one of these cabinets, your no doubt trying to track down that special pcb to wack into the cabinet and play it for real using the real pcb. There are a few problems with that idea as your soon to find out as i did.

Before 1985 the arcade industry was seemingly in chaos, everyone had their own connections; cabinets were produced for one game and one game only (unless that same company releases a conversion kit for a particular cabinet to another game). Then in 1985 JAMMA (Japanese Arcade Machine Manufacturers Association) was introduced to the industry and like all good things was adopted as the standard across the boards.

As i mentioned earlier i received 4 pcbs with my 2 JAMMA cabinets, 3 of these were JAMMA boards and 1 of these 3 was damamged (System 18) the final board FlyBoy was not JAMMA. It was as KLOV states "unique" for want of a better word. So obviously i know have one board that is totally useless for my cabinets. One PCB i am looking for is Phoenix but again KLOV lists the conversion class (connection) as "unique" again making the board once purchased useless without some sort of fandagled adaption.

This is where Mame steps in for most enthusiasts, converting a cabinet to run Mame allows you to play games with 'unique' connections on a generic cabinet without having to buy the actual cabinet to run the actual board. Which let's face it, now days could run into $x000's, IF you can even track down the cabinet in the first place. You may already have the PCB but its mostly useless without the right cabinet to run it.

Creating the MAME Cabinet - The Simple Way

Parts Used:

Software Used:

The J-Pac is simply one of the best products in created if like me you do not want to modify the cabinets in any way. Even tho both my cabinets are generic LAI's they are THE australian cabinet from the 80's. So there is a certian history with all cabinets and sometimes it's best to bypass the butchering all together if possible. I purchased my J-Pac from Chris at OZStick. Brilliant guy was extremely informative and helpful. He sells them out of Melbourne, Victoria for $145 including J-Pac, PS2 Cable & Monitor extension cable. Then it's simple a case of heading off to the UltiMarc website for installation instructions and you should be able to get a dos screen up on your arcade monitor. The J-Pac also has support for upto 8 buttons per player, keep in mind that JAMMA only supports 3 buttons per player, so the extra buttons need to be wired directly onto the J-Pac. from the control panel

The J-Pac doesn't run any kind of sound amplification unfortunatley, although the excuse on the website is that JAMMA only supports mono sound. i say give us what it supports and lets be done with it. The only option is to either use some pc speakers or hard wire you cabinet speakers to the soundcard. The latter is not an option for me because like many i want to be able to play my boards as well as Mame which is why i bought a J-Pac in the first place.


The J-Pac

Fraggal's Boot CD makes getting setup and running on a cabinet so easy it's a crime. Its a brilliant software package althought the legality may be somewhat questionable, as long as you own a copy of Windows98 you should be fine using it. Using the Intel video card would not allow the setup to go as smoothly as it should have as the card was not recognised by the ADVCAB programs. Which unfortunatley sets up your resolutions for running vertical games on horizontal monitors and what not for AdvanceMAME. Also the ArcadeOS frontend was not set to InCabinet = 1 by default and i believe that was also a problem to do with the video card.

Found a simple workaround for the intel card problems run advv -vbev -rc advmame.rc from the AdvanceMAME directory and test all your resolutions out, press f2 to save then try running 1942 or another vertical game.


The PC being setup

The soundcard did not like the drivers that were installed with the Boot CD, i will assume that was my fault for the moment as there was a few to options to choose from. As a result, while i could get sound in ArcadeOS i could not get sound in AdvanceMAME. AdvanceMAME itself would just crash out on most soundcard choices and those that did load, would refuse to play any sound at all. After reading the advancemame users-group i found the solution was to be had with the EasyMameCab SBPCI.ZIP drivers. A simple install of these drivers and sound was alive and kicking all over the shop. After installing the drivers I had to re-edit the config.sys & autoexec.bat files to point to c:\dos instead of c:\windows. I also had to add the path and arcadeOS executable lines to the autoexec.bat, It may be an idea to remember this if you are going to try it.

After all of that i have one fully working Mame Cabinet. Here are a few shots of Street Fighter Alpha 2 running (Hi Slate)

A few new shots of Don Don Pachi Running after i managed to work out my vert problems.

email