MAME Arcade Machine

Late October/Early November

It all began with Gauntlet. Gauntlet was the first arcade game I can recall spending a significant amount of money on. I hadn't given Gauntlet much thought for a long time, until I was reading about some new Gauntlet game being released on Xbox.

So, I decided to download MAME and see if I still liked the game. I did. However something was missing... what was it .. well, playing the game on the keyboard does suck. Oh, and it's a four player game, it really works better when you have a few friends playing it at once. Hmm ...

Another game I spent a lot of time playing was Street Fighter II. I played this for a little while in MAME but that sucked on keyboard even more than Gauntlet did. I tried out USB convertors for the Xbox and Playstation 2 controllers, and while this was marginally better for Gauntlet, it still sucked in Street Fighter II. And I couldn't see having friends cramming around my laptop to play Gauntlet.

I'd just come into a little money from my tax return, and I hadn't really spent a large sum on money on myself for a long time, my birthday had just been, so I decided I was going to build a 4 player upright arcade machine based on MAME.

At the very least it'd give people something to do on poker nights while they wait for poker to finish. :)

November/December 2005, January 2006

I knew a guy from work who'd built up his own MAME system, so I picked his brain on some of the details. He'd purchased his cabinet outright from Child Amusements, and purchased some of the related electronic gear (VGA cards, controller boards, etc) from OzStick. I did some research on the J-PAC and ArcadeVGA card from Ultimarc (both supplied in Australia by OzStick), and checking the required specs for MAME, and began planning.

First things first was to obtain a cabinet. I visited Child Amusement's factory floor and looked for 4 joystick cabinets, which was required to get full use out of Gauntlet. One of the guys who runs Child Amusements, Keith, showed me a Major Title 2 cabinet, which had a large screen (27") and 4 joystick holes in the console. The console was a little odd shaped, not a regular square shape that you find with most home MAME setups, and I liked the thought of having something that's a little different. He turned it on and it seemed that the moniter was faulty (no signal at all), but Keith reckoned that wouldn't be too hard to get fixed. He offered it to me for $650 with a working monitor, and I said yes and gave him a part payment of $300, expecting the system to be fixed and up and running within a couple of weeks.

Incidently, I suckered another work mate into coming along, and he's now also quite interested in building an arcade machine... Hi Steve!

Well, I left it a bit longer than that because I didn't have the cash to pay it off, so about 3-4 weeks later after not hearing back from Keith I gave them a call, and it turned out they were having some problems getting the monitor working. It had been sent off for repair, and had come back, but they left it running overnight and it faded out again, so it was off for further repairs.

I left it another fortnight (loosely based around when my pay came through, incidently), and rang again. The monitor had been back from repair again, but the problem was still occurring. It turned out that they'd only sent the monitor electronics to the repair guy, and even though he'd found and fixed a fault, there turned out to be some deeper fault in the tube itself. They were getting busy with the Christmas orders by now too. I left it go for another week or so and chased it again, and they were trying to tee up some time to swap another monitor into the cabinet. This didn't end up happening due to the Christmas rush, and so I left it until after New Years.

Meanwhile, I snagged a P4 1.8GHz motherboard and cpu with 512 MB of RAM for $60 from the computer parts recycler that shares our building at work. Score! Add a spare computer case and a new power supply and I have most of my MAME system built. I also purchased an ArcadeVGA and a J-PAC from OzStick, and some wiring.

I decided I wanted to go all Linux for the base system, and chose Gentoo because, well, Gentoo rules. Some have called it the rice-boy of Linux distributions, but I really like the idea of compiling everything from scratch optimised for your system. For something that can be as CPU intensive as MAME, this level of optimisation seemed like a good fit.

On the advice of my work mate, I chose to use AdvanceMAME. I played with it until I got it working somewhat, but I didn't have an Arcade monitor to plug into so I couldn't fine tune it to the ArcadeVGA card just yet. I discovered Aaron's MAME'd Millipede Project which went into a great amount of detail on building his Linux system with AdvanceMAME, and I found this information invaluable. Thanks heaps Aaron! So by mid-December I had a mostly working MAME system just waiting for the cabinet to put it in.

After the Christmas/New Year's break, I arranged to go in myself and give Keith a hand swapping the monitor over, partly because I wanted it to actually get done, and partly because I wanted to see how these things all fit together. So I visited the factory on a Saturday, and Keith and I pulled the system apart, checked another system, and measured the tubes, only to find out that the one I'd picked was an odd size tube at 27", where most seem to be either 26" or 29". Curses! It looks like my "pick something a little different" idea came back to bite me in the arse. So nothing was achieved this day, except we know my system really is an odd one. I said that I didn't really have my heart set on that particular cabinet, and if they had another 4 player one then maybe we could go with that. Keith said he'd sort something out and get back to me.

Gave it another week and really started chasing it down. Turns out the other guy at Child Amusements knew they had another 27" monitor around which worked, and they were in the process of swapping this one into my cabinet. Finally this was all completed by January 19th 2006, and they got the system delivered to me on January 24th. Yaaaay!

January 24th 2006

It's arrived! I finally have a working arcade cabinet in my garage. The guys from Child Amusements left a working board (Willow) in the machine so I could see it in action, and it all looks good although I couldn't play the game because there's no coin activation switch, d'oh. But that's ok, the main thing is the monitor works and has a good picture, and the sound also works. I'd planned on modifying the controls anyway so I wasn't too worried about the mess of the wiring system just yet.

Some pictures.

January 25th 2006

My basic plan for the control panel is the make the two central controls a 6 button setup for playing Street Figher type games, and have three buttons on the satellite controls for regular games (I don't know of a four player game which needs more than three, but I can expand these to four buttons if necessary).

With this in mind, I've taken a bit of a look at the plates that the buttons and joysticks mount to, and it looks like I've hit my first snag. The plates mount on to the wood of the control panel frame, and the holes for the buttons are positioned in such a way that there is no space for extra buttons above or below the existing outward buttons. I would need to cut part of the wooden frame out to make them fit, and even if I did this the metal plates have mouting screws that would be too close to the holes I'm trying to cut. It looks like I will need to have some custom plates fabricated.

The next problem is working out all the wiring. This is meant to be a four player system, but the wiring in the back is JAMMA - which only supports 2 joysticks and 3/4 buttons by default (not including coin drop and player start buttons). Street Fighter actually uses a custom plug to support the extra buttons (6 per player), and I'll need to wire this into the J-PAC manually anyway, but what's going on with the existing wiring? The satellite joysticks had been removed and plugged, so perhaps the previous owner ripped the wiring apart and made it standard JAMMA? I'll need to investigate more.

I took some more pictures, but I don't have then extracted from the camera yet. I'll put them up later.

January 26th

I did a little Googling for Major Title 2, and found out that it's definitely JAMMA, but has two extra connectors for players 3 and 4. So that's good news, as it means the wiring probably hasn't been modified. The bad news is that these custom connectors only have space for 2 buttons and combines the coin drop and player start button into one, so there's a total of 3 buttons per player. That's not really enough for me, so I'm going to have to do some custom wiring anyway. I'm seriously considering ditching the J-PAC and going for an I-PAC4, which will handle all four players with slots to spare.

More pics

It seems likely that the existing wiring supports 3 buttons per player, but I won't be sure until I check it with a multimeter.

January 28/29

I decided to move this all onto one page for easier reading.

I'd called OzStick on Wednesday to see if they knew anyone who'd be able to fabricate some plates up for me, but although they are planning on making up arcade cabinet kits and would need to work with some metalworking places to do this, they hadn't done this yet and couldn't help me. I called Child Amusements, and Keith was the guy I needed to speak to, but he had a day off. I called on Friday, but missed him. I left my number, but I wasn't really expecting a call back, and as per usual there wasn't one. I'll try again next week, but this means my plans for the panels are on hold for now.

I moved the cabinet to a slightly more out of the way position in the garage, and moved the computer I'd built up for it in there too. Plugged it all together, which was pretty straightforward with the J-PAC, and fired it up. Ok, I got the typical Linux boot up text on the arcade monitor, and got a prompt, good stuff. It's a bit blurry, but I expect that's because the text mode isn't so good on the arcade monitor, or possibly the signal is being overdriven, but I'll worry about that later.

Started tweaking the settings in svgalib, AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMenu. Managed to get MAME working, but was having some issues with Menu. I was editing the config file when suddenly, the computer just shut off! The cabinet still had power, so the power supply seemed to be ok. I thought it might be heat related, but after some testing I determined that the power supply had blown. This made me suspect the power supply to the garage, and in particular that power plug, might be causing some surges or something, because I'd also had a power brick for a battery charger die while on that point as well. Luckily I had a spare power supply, and I moved to another power point in the garage, and rebooted the system, and everything seems to be ok. I still didn't get AdvanceMenu going yet, but I started up Gauntlet just for a look, but the controls weren't working too well and I gave up for the day.

Came back the next day and fired it up again. I'd found some example configs to work from, and tweak the configs,and finally got AdvanceMenu running. I spent about 15 minutes on the computer this time, and the supply didn't blow again (the other one blew within 10 minutes) so I think my suspicions about that point are correct. I should put some tape over it to stop it from being used. I also cut up a stereo audio cable I had and hooked up the sound to the J-PAC, but I had no sound .. it occurs to me now that Alsa (the Linux sound drivers) default to "mute" and zero volume for everything, so it's probably just that.

I'd forgotten that pressing the player start button also acts like a shift key, and so Start-Fire will do an insert coin (this is a feature of the J-PAC), so yesterday while testing Gauntlet I'd been stuck using the "test" button to get a credit, which only put in a credit for player 2 for some reason. It turns out that the player 2 wiring is completely stuffed, and for some reason the only button that works is the player start button, which also triggers button one. None of the joystick directions work, except for "up", which is actually not connected to the joystick and is dangling from the loom all by itself. Looks like I'll need to rewire that completely. The third joystick was a mess, for some reason it's loom had been cable tied to the player 2 loom, and looks like it's partly disconnected anyway.

The good news is that the player one controls almost completely work. The only fault there is that "down" flutters, meaning that it won't reliably trigger when you press down, and tends to "flutter" on and off. It's either a faulty button or the wiring is a bit loose.

All this is pushing me towards replacing all of the parts; I don't want to screw around with old and possibly faulty switches and joysticks. The joysticks that are in the machine are Australian made MCA joysticks, however this company doesn't appear to be in business anymore and so getting brand new MCAs may be difficult, especially in the colours I want (I want it to match up with the console colours, red, green, yellow and blue, which also match up with the Gauntlet colours). Happ's Competition Joystick has a good reputation, so I'm giving serious thought to buying four of these, particularly as they come in all the colours I want. I haven't found anyone local who deals in these, so I may need to import them. For the buttons, I'm getting suckered into the "cool" factor of having light up buttons, such as the Electric ICE Lightable Horizontal Pushbutton. These can have colours LED lights, and if you want to get really fancy you can get multi-colour lights that can change the colour of the button. I don't think I'll go that far, but I'd like all the buttons to light up with the colour of the console position (red console has red buttons, etc).

February 3rd

This project is in hiatus until I get over a financial hump. Check back in about a month.