so in a blinding flashback of nostalgia…
will mccown just came by with an oscilloscope, and showed me how to use it. as things turn out, i think that we need to split the signal. right now we’re wiring the V and H sync together into the monitor’s H sync input, which is ok because the input can actually accept a composite signal, but just wiring the lines together isn’t sufficient. we need to either:

a.) get a new wiring block and wire up a connector (should be easy at radio shack or similar), which is probably desireable anyway since the wiring is in bad need of cleaning up.

b.) configure the arcadeVGA card to output a composite signal to the H sync cable. this is tricky as it would require hooking up the computer to another monitor (probably at kurt’s house), and might not actually solve the problem.

so i am opting for a.), and will stop by the radio shack or equivalent on my way home tonight if i can (and if they’re open) and pick up the appropriate connection block.

hang tight, peeps.

several hours later…
the monitor has now lost all ability to sync horizontally or vertically. i can almost get it to sit still, but it’s still moving around ever so slowly. it was fine, nay, perfect for half the day, and then after a reboot, it’s just lost. i don’t know how it happened or how to fix it. if it’s an “it’s been on too long” problem, then maybe on monday it’ll be better. if that’s the case, then we’ll probably need to buy a new monitor after all… because who the fuck needs a monitor that only lasts for a couple hours before you have to turn it off? hell, i may as well put batteries in it and call it portable.

so it turns out that the microswitches were the problem, but not in the way that i thought. you need to have the buttons wired up so that the circuit is always open until the button is pressed. we had the wires running to the other pole, the one where the circuit is always closed. the poor ipac was sending start, button1, button2, button3, up, down, left, and right for player 1 and player 2 all at the same time. no wonder the damn thing was acting crazy! so i switched the connections and voila! we have gaming goodness. the monitor is not perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than nothing, so i’ll leave it at that and be happy. it’s got a big magnetic thing going on on the left side of the screen, i’m not sure what it is but i’m guessing a good degauss might take care of it. i’ll leave that for next week. anyway.

the only thing left to do for today is get a 1/8″ to RCA adapter to hook from the computer to the speakers in the cabinet (the cab has an amplifier! cool beans!), and we’ll have sound and video. it will be a multimediafest for the soul.

well, koz discharged the monitor last night, we rigged it up and booted it. no video. as things turn out, the monitor picks up a signal much better when the computer is actually turned on. so we got a signal, played with the monitor controls, got a good picture, and now we’re cookin’ with gas!

kurt predicted that something would, of course, be wrong with the i-pac setup. he’s so smart, i could kill him. something is sending a jillion signals per second into the ipac, making it impossible to click or type when the i-pac is plugged in. so i’ve disconnected everything and we’re going to start from zero and find where exactly it’s dying. i’m betting it’s either the not-new joysticks or one of the old microswitches that’s causing the problem. we’ll see.

anyhow, we’re almost there. stay on target… stay on target…

kurt did a lot of digging recently, and discovered that our medium res monitor is actually, in fact, an early multisync monitor! by disconnecting a set of cables from one set of pins and reconnecting them to an identical set of pins nearby, we can run our monitor at 15kHz! we tore off the back of the cabinet to see if this was indeed the case. it is! now we just need to find someone to discharge the monitor, as neither of us are really brave enough to try and attempt it ourselves. once we do, we can have a working arcade cabinet in about… 5 minutes! w00tsters!

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.