Nerdbloke

I’ve found that some folks have managed to get two LCD Topgun lightguns working on their mame cabinets.

There is also a *massive* write-up about them here.

When I purchased two I had every intention of getting them both working together, but have never got it to happen. I was not using Smogs drivers, so we’ll have to see how it goes.

I’m pretty excited about playing two-player “Cabal” and “Operation Wolf”.

It was late at night. It was dark in the garage. I was tired. I stumbled across a stick of RAM. **Brilliant idea** “I’ll stick this in the MAME PC”.

I am such an idiot. I managed to force a stick of PC-133 RAM into my last spare DDR RAM slot. The PC did not boot (no surprise there). I took it out. The PC did not boot. I realised what I had done. OMG I am such an idiot! Totally screwed the motherboard.

I have since purchased a replacement board of ebay. Gigabyte GA-7VA with a XP2000 CPU and coolermaster CPU fan. Whan I get a spare moment I will swap it into the MAME cabinet. (probably next christmas some time…

I’ve been busy playing farmer-boy recently. I’ve been building stable yards and internal fences in anticipation of the arrival of the wife’s horse.

Also, the wife is just about to drop bub number two. Allegedly a boy, but the ultrasound nurse said it’s never 100%.

I haven’t done any work on the MAME cabinet lately, due to the above reasons. I have been looking at upgrading the ROMS and CHD’s to the latest version (version 0.113 as I type). Unfortunately the CHD’s are now > 50GB in size! That’s pretty hefty for a 512K connection, especially when I am on a 20GB/mth connection… I think I’ll concentrate on the ROMS first.

I have been playing around with the arcade machine software. Specifically getting Windows 2000 to boot faster. It’s probably about 30 seconds now – that’s from turning on the power via the trackball (BIOS power-on settings). I’ve removed the Win2K boot logo by adding the /noguiboot flags to the boot.ini file. I am also using the /nodebug /fastdetect flags to speed things up as much as possible.

/FASTDETECT – Specifying FASTDETECT causes NTDETECT to skip parallel and serial device enumeration for a boot into Win2K, whereas omitting the switch has NTDETECT perform enumeration for a boot into NT 4.0. Win2K setup automatically recognizes dual-boot configurations and sets this switch for BOOT.INI lines that specify a Win2K boot. Windows 2000/XP Only./NODEBUG – No debugging information is being used.

/NOGUIBOOT – When this option is specified the VGA video driver responsible for presenting bit mapped graphics during Win2K’s boot process is not initialized. The driver is used to display boot progress information, as well as to print the Blue Screen crash screen, so disabling it will disable Win2K’s ability to do those things as well. Windows 2000/XP only.

I’ve also removed the startup dialog screens by doing this:

1. Go to, Start Menu -> Run and enter regedit
2. Navigate to entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>Policies>System
3. If there is an entry for “DisableStatusMessages” set it to 1 (the digit one)

* If there is no entry, right-mouse click the “System” word, and select New->DWORD value, and enter “DisableStatusMessages”, right-mouse to edit the value of it, and enter 1 (the digit one).

I’ve been trying to get rid of the login screen a it flashes past, to no avail. I’ve got it so a user is automatically logged in but it still flashes the (grayed-out) dialog for a second. Very frustrating. I am trying to make this machine look as much NOT like a standard PC as possible. Removing the login prompt is the last step…

I also changed the registry setting for the default background colour, so that it’s now black (0 0 0) rather than blue(0 78 152):

• User Key: [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors]
• Value Name: Background
• Data Type: REG_SZ (String Value)
• Value Data: 0 0 0 – 255 255 255

I have been doing lots of non-MAME stuff lately so havent worked on the MAME box for a few weeks. But not too long ago I went on a bit of a frenzy and have nearly got the base finished. Unfortunately I stuffed up the routing for one of the sides and have decided to replace that piece of timber with a brand new piece…which will require dismantling what I’ve put together so far. Bummer!

1. I have put the base together. It’s got a sliding keyboard draw and a big coin mechanism.

2. Here’s a bigger picture – you can see the 27 inch TV that’s going to be used as the monitor, and the prototype control panel.

3. I’ve used a desk draw lock to lock/unlock the coin mech. Upon opening the coin mech door you have access to the innards of the box and can open the lower front panel.

4. Opening the lower front panel to give access to the PC and other electronics that will be stashed in here. I’ll probably use this space as temporary storage for all the bits and pieces of not-yet-used MAME paraphernalia.

5. The keyboard tray uses the same type of lock as the coin mechanism.

6. Here is a long shot with everything that opens and shuts.

7. Close up of the lower panel. You can just see the simple slide lock that keep the lower panel from opening. The mobo/HDD’s/PSU etc are underneath the plastic at the rear of the base. I’ll probably move them closer to the front when I finish this, simply so I can access the optical drives via the coin mech door, rather than having to open the entire lower panel.

I started mucking around with lighting for my translucent trackball this evening. Actually, last night, it’s ticked over midnight nearly two hours ago. A christmas decoration with about 1000 red green and yellow lights carked it. I figured the lights would come in handy.

So tonight I rigged up a spare power supply, using the shorting technique* to get power of the rails without being plugged into a PC, and figured I would need only one of the little christmas lights to light my track ball from beneath.

I attempted to take some photos of the back-lit trackball – it was really quite hard…

Photo 1: Totally dark room. Flash went off. Can see everything except for how well the trackball is lit.

Photo 2: Totally dark room. I set the camera to suppress the flash. Can’t see anything but the trackball. At least you know it’s there…

Photo 3: Nearly dark room. I turned on a small flashlight in the corner. I also enabled the camera’s “moon vision” function. I am not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination so I am guessing it forces the lens/iris bit to be wide open. It’s also blurry because it was a three second affair. have you ever tried to hold a camera steady for three seconds? It’s hard.

With the three pictures you can see that the trackball throws out a fair bit of light.

*Shorting technique for PSU’s: older 20-pin ATX PSU’s can be coaxed to turn on by shorting the green and black wires (pins 4 and 5) of the motherboard power connector. Once plugged into your standard 240 volts the fans will spin up and you will get power thru the 12V and 5V rails, without the need to have you PSU connected to a PC. Very handy for testing basic DC electronics, or checking your individual PC components.

The base is coming along fine. I am up to the stage where I will have to use my router with the slot cutter to cut the slots to fit the t-molding into.

I followed some recommendations to test my skill with the router on a scrap piece of timber first – very glad I did as I found you have to be very careful not to ‘jiggle’ the router. Otherwise the slot becomes to big and the t-molding doesn’t fit snuggly in the slot.

I am going to have to figure out a method to hold the timber very securely while I am routing it. I think the slight movements that occurred whilst routing on my saw horses resulted in the ‘jiggly’ bits.

Apart from a few bits where the t-molding didn’t have a snug fit everything was pretty good. I had to use my wooden mallet to force the t-molding all the way into the slot. I’d prefer to use a rubber mallet – but I don’t have one so I’ll just have to be gentle when using the mallet to not damage the t-molding.

Here’s a shot of where I am up to. I have the top of the base, plus the supports for the top, but they are not shown because I can’t get them to stay in place without permanently fixing them in place.

I have cut out both sides of the cabinet base now. I was thinking about cutting out the rest of the pieces required for the base and realised I only just have enough ply to do the job.

As I want to get this right first time I decided to use Google Sketchup and create my cabinet base as a 3D model first. That way I can play with the model until I get it just the way I want.

I am really glad I did, as I have already discovered a few mistakes that I would have made on the first run. Sketchup also allows me to measure dimensions to the millimetre – so I can use my 3D model as my reference now, rather than my dodgy paper blueprint.

I have uploaded the model to the Google 3D Warehouse – you can view it here. It looks like this:

I managed to cut out one of the side panels for the MAME cabinet base this afternoon. I did a much better job cutting straight lines with this panel then the previous top panels. I took it really slow, and tried to cut my lines so that half of the pencil mark remained on the panel. It took a bit of time, but worked out extremely well. The lines are damn straight and will need only minor work with a file to get them dead straight. My best work yet.

1. Marked some lines on a sheet of 2400×1200 ply.

2. Here’s the result of 5 minutes work with my jijgsaw.

3. Here is the panel in an upright position. Underneath the plastic is my prototype control panel and 68cm TV that are going to be used in the cabinet.

4. Here is the panel standing in front of a previously cut top panel. It gives a decent impression of what the shape of the final product should be.

A fellow blogger that started his MAME cabinet after me has basically finished it. I have got the urge to get back to work on mine. With the recent move and all the related busy-ness of living on a 5 acre block I haven’t had much time to do any work on it.

Well – no more. Here is the plane for the base. It’s based on the “Ultimate Arcade II” I am hoping to start cutting it out today.

I purchased two LCD Topguns (review here) a while back. I think I mentioned them in a previous post. They are great. Although getting two to work at once might be difficult. Games like Operation Wolf are great using a gun.

Alos got myselft a scrappy old coin door that I’ll polish up with some autosol to make it look respectable. I donlt know if I will make the mame cab use coins to start games or just have the coin door for effect…

Three options:
1. Coin door does nothing but look realistic.
2. Coin door uses coins to insert credits into games.
3. Coin door coin-return button used to insert credits.

I think I like option three better. That way I can get rid of two buttons on the control panel – keeping the CP true-to-form of a real arcade machine.

I’ll post some pics shortly so I can keep track of how it looked before and after I polished it up.