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!

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!

with all the parts coming in, we’re almost ready to build the pc part of the project!

on the other hand, we need to take the next step on the cabinet. mitch and i talked and we think that the best thing to do is to take measurements, disassemble, take the measurements we couldn’t get when it was in one piece, make plans, then revise them for accomodating a wider control panel, finalize the plans, and start building a new cabinet. unless anyone has a better idea (please speak up if you do, we’re just wingin’ it here), that’s what we’ll do as soon as we can.

as for the panel, i envisioned it working kind of like a jewelry box, where the sides and bottom are built as part of the cabinet, and then the lid (sticks and buttons) has an internal hinge and flips up so that we can get at the underbelly when necessary. this is just off the top of my head, so again — if anyone has any better ideas about how to engineer that part, let me know. we’ll obviously need something strong as a hinge and latching mechanism so that it can take the abuse of the joysticks being jerked around a lot. i’m open to ideas.

so that’s where we’re headed. i’m looking into the possiblity of using MDO (medium-density-overlay) instead of MDF for the cabinet body, since it’s less susceptible to weathering. it’s probably more expensive, but i’m not sure of the cost right now. we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. ^_^

jeff tells me that he’s brought in the motherboard/cpu/ram today! things are definitely moving along.

i’m also going to look today at a place that kurt tells me has links there for getting your MDF on, with the cutting and everything. dunno how expensive it will be, but if it’s too rich for our blood, there’s nothing wrong with a few days of DIY cabinet-making.

onward and upward, my evil minions!

update — we now have motherboardity. it’s what we need, and it’s got the CPU which is also nice. oh, look, half a gig of RAM! and a fancy firewire card to boot. that’s nice. thanksvery much to jeff for donating. however, we’re still missing a fan for the CPU. i’m going to see if we can’t scratch one up, and if no, then jeff is going to order one for us. wheeeee!

parts are starting to come in. we already have a PSU, NIC, and a nice audigy soundcard. i think once the dust settles, we’ll only be lacking a DVD-ROM drive. looks like that’s going to be a hard one to find, at least right now. i’m sure we’ll find one on the cheap soon enough. thanks again to everyone who coughed up a part or two.