So i’m thinking sad thoughts about having to potentially rebuild the cabinet because the gorramn sides are puffy all around the edges where the MDF has absorbed too much moisture. maybe its previous home was a bathhouse? or a bar where people had water guns? who knows. anyway, there’s just not much we can do about it (from a salvage standpoint), save trying to sand it and then laquer over it. and i bet you can guess how successful that’s going to be.

which leads us to trying to trace the sides of the cabinet to get approximate dimensions, and/or getting plans online and adapting them to use (and/or just building the damn thing over from scratch).

in the brief amount of searching i’ve done so far, i’ve found this plan at MAMEWorld (the ‘Galagads’ plan). it’s fairly informative, and even if we can ultimately use it, will help us design our own. i’ll post more as i find them. if anyone’s reading this and knows of a useful cabinet plan resource, post a comment and let me know. i’d be uber-grateful.

Just real fast, i’ve added an inventory link to help keep track of the items we have and what we still need. it’s over there on the right, under the ‘Inventory’ category of links.

looks like if our arcade monitor is a bust, we’ll have a loaner PC monitor to use until we decide on a final video solution. Viviana has graciously donated an old 19″ monitor for us to use. yayyy parts!

now all we have to do is clean the damn thing.

which will happen some day this week.

we hope.

so our golden axe monitor is very probably busted and no good. i’ll hold onto hope until we can test it, but i’m certainly not going to hold my breath or anything. it is a standard resolution monitor though, which is what we’d want.

so i wrote a friend of mine and asked what he used for his MAME cabinet, and he reports that the Wells-Gardner D9200 is the ‘cadillac of arcade monitors’, but i think i’d be happy with just about any of their product line. Not that we could probably afford one, given our nonexistent budget. maybe a TV, maybe an old computer monitor, maybe a used arcade monitor. we’ll have to take what we can get.

it’s also time to get rags and sponges and buckets out of the closet — next week is (hopefully) the beginning of cleaning!

well, maybe not a canal. BUT — simeon had a pretty good Plan for how we should proceed on the “What The Hell Do We Do Now?” front, since we have a cabinet in bad shape and a monitor that we don’t know whether it works or not. he proposed the following, which i’ve modified a little with other things we’ll need to do:

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So i found this cabinet on craigslist for $40, and a few days later, mitch and harrison picked up the cabinet (the 11th, i think) from some guy near USC. i have no idea where it came from or anything other than that. :D

the mainboard is gone, which we knew. the guy we got it from had no idea whether the monitor worked, so that will be one thing we test. it’s a standard res arcade monitor, so that’s good at least (if it works and doesn’t have terrible burn-in). the whole damn thing is in terrible need of cleaning, and we know that quarters get stuck in the coin slot. we’ve only had it for a day so far, so we haven’t put any power to it yet. that might be the first item of business, just to see what bursts into flames and what doesn’t. i’m not really sure what actually needs to be done first, so when we figure that out and do it, i’ll let you know.

i’ve made a flickr photoset of the pics we took to document the ‘before’ phase, and it’s here. Enjoy, and feel free to comment.