pc is up and running mamewah 1.161 just fine. need to set up keyboard combos inside MAME so that we can manipulate everything from the control panel. kurt brought in buttons, tape, and wiring so we can start drilling the new control panel. next monday or tuesday we should be able to bring the cabinet into the office and start working on it there.

i guess i have to buckle down and actually start designing the control panel!

setting up mamewah was tricky but manageable. i think i would have had an easier time of it if the documentation had been more complete. i’m pretty sure it wasn’t my fault, either. i’m used to reading man pages and all that crap, but these docs were not good. they were okay for general stuff, but after you get past the generics and into the details, they pretty much fell apart and i wound up looking online for a LOT of the stuff that i wound up using.

so here’s what’s happening recently:

not much.

ha! i kid. seriously, though. we’re still moving ahead, but slowly. right now i’m trying to get the right build for the box. i want a good combination of minimal overhead vs. ease of maintenance, and this is proving to be hard to set up. :) there’s an advanceCD build that boots straight off of a cd (very minimal overhead), but it would need to have to be altered by hand to look at the hard drive, etc. (and we’d have to do it again every time we decided to use a new release), which == high-maintenance.

i think we may have a possible compromise in gentoo between overhead and maintenance, but i won’t say more until i have it up and running. i spent a good chunk of time last night setting it up only to realize that i’d set up the stupid partitions wrong, and i have to do it over. :) oh well.

just so you guys know, the project isn’t dead by any stretch of the imagination.

i gave up on svgalib under SuSE. i know it’s probably an extreme decision to switch flavors of linux merely for a build problem, but i was also having bloat issues, since we’ve only got a 20gb HDD to work with at the moment. i wasn’t able to get a minimal install to my liking without expending considerable effort to wade through pages of dependencies in YaST, so i decided to see what gentoo has to offer (i’ve noticed lots of people saying that gentoo is what they’ve used for their cabinets).

so, we’ll see what happens. i’m doing my first emerge –sync right now.
in other news, not much is happening. we’re still moving forward, though. it’s just quiet. maybe… too quiet. ;)

i know, i know. i could use AdvanceCD, but i want a little more than that, and i don’t like the potentially over-complicated upgrade path for what is essentially a static disc image. i’d have to rewire the config files every time a new disc came out, and i think it would just be ugly. plus, if i left R&H, not many people would be able to maintain the machine, which could be Bad.

sorry about the downtime on saturday. had to reboot the machine and i’d forgotten that i hadn’t set the proper scripts in rc3.d yet so that apache and mysql start automagically. should be fixed now!

yet, i’m trying to install svgalib on this box. just for advmame. i must have some kind of latent masochism or something of which i wasn’t previously aware. sigh.

so!

we have a working CPU, a nice cabinet, kurt’s ordering parts, and i’ve got 0.105 in my grubby little paws. i’m nabbing the extras (artwork, marquees, bezels, screens, etc.) as i write this, should be done in about an hour. the roms themselves take more than 3 DVDs, and the extras are another 1.2gb! all told, about 4 DVDs, and that’s not counting CHD’s. yikes!
next step — control panel, i think! wheee…

the only issue i’m having at the moment is that the hard drive is going to be pretty much close to full by the time everything’s installed. ultimately, i don’t want to leave anything out, but i guess if i had to, i could dump the mahjonng games, since we don’t really plan on having an interface for them.

and i’m torn on the ‘adult’ games. i want to have a complete romset, but i sure as heck don’t want somebody’s kid walking up to the cabinet in the front lobby and accidentally picking strip poker or something. maybe it would be best to cull those. :)

finally, we fixed the friggin’ cpu. stepped down the cpu speed to 1.2 instead of 1.6 in the BIOS and wham! instant gratification. so SuSE 9.3 is installed, i’ve put jeff’s 2nd stick of ram in there (which we’ll test tonight) to make a solid 1gb of ram, so the only thing we’re missing is a soundcard. the Creative Audigy that we had was keeping the machine from passing POST somehow. i’m going to try it again now that the CPU issues are solved, but i’m not holding my breath.

systems is willing to host the machine for a few weeks while we get it loaded up with roms, and it’ll be hooked up to the network during that time, to allow me to give it a hostname (rhythm-mame?) and get compiling on the stuff i need to do in order to get it running all the right software.

i have an old set (0.86 or 0.87) of roms that i like, but i could see getting a fresh set, just for fun. who knows? anyway, we’ll be moving right along soon :)

now, if i could just figure out a way to mount the keyboard and mouse in a hidden-yet-easily-accessible place…

so yeah, you may have noticed from the previous post that we’re ditching the Golden Axe cabinet and going with dynamite cop. hell, it’s bigger, wider, can accomodate 4 people, and is in much better shape. by an order of magnitude.

first item of business is to clean it out. heeeeeere we go!

*glee*

gentlemen and ladies,

kurt and i arrived at rhythm and hues yesterday evening, kurt’s SUV /burgeoning/ with the feeling of imminent arcadeishness. our traps were full. our analogies — terrible. yea, dear reader, we were not only successful, we done it up with *style*.
we present to you a fully working version of Dynamite Cop! it’s a Technos (long ‘o’) 2 player cabinet with SEGA model 2 hardware. the control panel is actually designed for 4 players (holes drilled underneath indicate 4 players with 2 or 3 buttons each), but it’s currently configured for 2. i believe that it’s easily large enough to be engineered for four players with room to spare (spinner, anyone?). I’ve checked KLOV, and i’m pretty sure that it used to be a WWF WrestleFest. are you excited yet? :) i am! it’s in the back loading dock next to the golden axe cabinet, under the protected area today. so go have a look (now we gotta get rid of that damn golden axe cab).

Some details:

The Good:

• fully working
• good wiring
• stereo audio amplifier with volume control
• pre drilled for 4 players (unsure how useable this is, however)
• sega model II hardware can be resold on ebay for more parts [model II also can run Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter II, etc]
• 27″ monitor with front mounted controls under the bezel.
• no burn-in

The Unknown:

• monitor may be standard resolution (because wrestlefest is), or it may be medium resolution (if the operator swapped out the monitor for a new one when he converted to Dynamite Cop). because medium resolution games (like dynamite cop) can be run on standard monitors (like wrestlefest), and that the original machine was standard resolution, I think we have a standard res arcade monitor. If its a medium resolution monitor, then we can’t run standard res games on it. HOWEVER, since we’re hooking the whole thing up to a pc, its a moot point.

The Bad:

• cabinet is in average condition, needs new t-molding and paint.
• finding a good spot to place it (this shouldn’t be a problem once we get it fixed up).

So now we need some more stuff:

• Arcade vga, a modifed radeon card for 80$ that can auto convert any pc resolution to arcade (standard/medium) modes.
• a 4 player i-pac. kurt was going to donate his, but it’s only good for 2 players, but we can use it in the meantime for testing.
• some more buttons with sticks, kurt is donating 2 happs competition joysticks and a bag of blue and red buttons.

Kurt has posted pictures of our arcade auction adventure!

and lastly, cost. the auction we went to was a ‘premium’ auction, meaning that everything was working (well, rigged to work for the duration of the auction anyway), so the prices weren’t exactly what we wanted, but i think we got a good deal, since the starting bid was about $200 or so for most of the cabs. here’s the skinny on the final bill:

$150.00 — our final bid
$19.50 — auctioneer’s fee based on +13% of final bid price
$12.36 — sales tax
======================
$181.87 — grand total

either the ram or the CPU is fried on the box we’ve built. jeff’s going to bring in replacement ram to test against, so that should be helpful. SuSE install went balls-up when trying to determine if the installer image was gzipped or not, and a redhat install died doing (almost) the same thing. so we decided to run memtest, which ran for about a half hour before crashing with no explanation. bleh.

also, it seems that the Creative Audigy card we’d received is causing the computer to not even be able to POST. not even a beep! so we’re looking for a replacement soundcard. kind of an important piece of the puzzle, no?
kurt and i are definitely going to the anaheim convention center sunday to pick up a useable cabinet.

other than those items, not a whole lot going on at the moment. i wish i could say there was more, but there really isn’t. unfortunately, it’s a little slow going, but we’re still moving forward. never give up! never surrender!