Kurt writes in:

We wired up everything last night. Expecting to have some games for everyone today.

Except for one… small… little.. tiny… detail.

Way back when we got the Dynamite Cop machine I made the comment that most 3D arcade games use medium resolution arcade monitors, and if its that kind of monitor it would cause us some problems for emulation. We found out that the arcade machine was a WWF Wrestlefest conversion so we assumed that the operator of the machine did a conversion but left the original standard resolution monitor.

And we never double checked the monitor’s model number.

Oops.

So now we got a perfect medium resolution monitor but we can’t run most games on it. To give you an idea how rare these monitors are, there are about 7000+ arcade games emulated. About 50 out of the 7000 games use these types of monitors.

Generally monitors come in 3 kinds for arcades:

• standard resolution [15-16khz video aka. CGA 200-250 lines]
• medium resolution [25khz video, aka. EGA 300-400 lines]
• VGA resolution [31.5khz+ 480-1024lines+]

If the arcade monitor was standard or vga, we’d be fine, but it just happens we are left with a medium resolution monitor. Its a nice monitor, higher resolution to display 3d games without interlace flicker, but that doesn’t help our project.

So right now we got a few scenarios:

1. Sell or Trade the monitor and sega model III Hardware to get a standard resolution arcade monitor.
2. Get arcade OS/advance mame/powerstrip and fiddle with software and hardware settings to trick the pc into always outputting 25Khz video.
3. Buy a used or new arcade monitor or use a pc monitor.

Right now I’m leaning towards #1, we should be able to get a even trade for the boards and monitor for another monitor, especially since our monitor is in very nice shape along with the sega model III Board. Dynamite cop, as a game, isn’t very desireable, but the hardware can also run daytona USA. Many arcade operators seek out model 3 boards for spare parts.

So right now the only thing slowing us down is the monitor, on the upside we got all new buttons and wiring on the control panel, hooked up the ipac interface card.

i’m asking people for their favorite games they played in the arcades growing up, and i’m getting quite a few awesome responses. i’m now keeping a list of people’s suggestions. the final list will be going into a ‘favorites’ list on the arcade cabinet. feel free to suggest your own*!

*: by which i mean “leave a comment on this post”. :)

i forget if i’ve mentioned this or not, but thanks to jason, we have a soundblaster Live! card and an extra 60gb hdd. this means that the roms and all can live on the 60gb drive and not be affected by the OS on the 20gb boot drive, especially if we need to reinstall or something. awesome! it’s better than seperation of church and state!

PC is running awesomely. may have to rescale the layout to less than 1024×768, though. i forget if our arcade monitor can do that high of a res.

we have a 4-player ipac, a breakout cable, an arcadeVGA card, a working PC (all ready to go), and a cabinet up in my office. i think we’re ready to rock and roll, ladies and gentlemen. also we’re having lots of buttons and microswitches, wiring, tape, and all the good things you might expect.

i’m stoked. i’m going to work on it this week some, but next week i’m out of the office on vacation. i’m thinking the week after that we’ll have it all together and running on the temporary control panel setup. once we’ve got that, we can buy a new piece of MDF and drill a decent 4-player cabinet. wheeee!

*rocks out*

so in one post, i’m talking about gentoo vs. SuSE, and in the next one, i’m revealing how the machine is working fine with MAMEwah and XPSP2. perhaps i should explain a leetle, no?

so i didn’t get too far in the gentoo build. i realized how inane it was to build every little thing that i might need from source. i know that there’s a performance gain, but the benefit didn’t outweigh the cost for me. so i switched to ubuntu, which seemed to be generally the same thing but a much more stupid-friendly build. again, i got stuck. not for lack of trying, but at work we use SuSE, and i’ve had my head wrapped around the way novell does linux for so long that it was a real pain to try and think about things the ubuntu way. conf files are in different directories, even runlevels work differently. again, not worth it. i’m not slagging the build of either flavor; i just didn’t want to invest the time to learn a new paradigm.

so i tooled around a little bit more with advMAME, and discovered that a lot of my initial problems in SuSE with svgalib and advmame were that i hadn’t had everything installed that i needed. there was a lot of kernel rebuilding and package-installing. it was very intense, and it’s already faded from my brain, much like the few glorious days after finals are over when everything leaks right out of your ears. suffice to say that i got it all running, but then advmenu would randomly hang when advmame was done running a game, and i couldn’t get the damn frontend to come back without canceling the process and launching advmenu again. not really great for an ‘embedded’ solution inside a cabinet. so after much more tinkering and hemming and hawing, i let loose a great cry of anguish, and installed XP instead. you know something? mamewah runs great. i’m sad that i couldn’t get linux to be the toy i wanted it to be, but i’m much more happy in the end, knowing that my end solution works.

my friend kurt just got his custom-ordered slikstik in the mail yesterday via UPS. it’s a frikkin’ monster! see it in all its flickry glory.