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I made my own mame cabinet a few years ago. It was a brutal amount of work (the machine was dilapidated and had no artwork when I bought it) but I think it came out pretty good! Before:  After:    I got really lucky and managed to get a brand new standard res Wells Gardner monitor like three years ago so everything looks razor sharp with no burn in. It was a lot of work and it's not for the feint of heart. I've since added two Ultimarc light guns. The only other thing I'd like is a sit down mame cab for racing games because I'm not putting a steering wheel and pedal on my TMNT machine.
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Oct 23, 2019 13:33
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I bet you could handle Darius with an ultra-wide LCD personally the biggest thing for me in the MAME cabinet was using a legit arcade CRT. I really hate the way retro games look on LCDs. But if you can look past that point, you'd save a good $500 or so (I remember when I was able to buy 25" WG monitors for $50 on craigslist in like 2008....drat how time has changed!) I also had to use a fork of MAME called GroovyMAME which is meant for people using arcade CRTs.
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Oct 23, 2019 13:55
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Zaphod42 posted:I've thought about getting an actual Cabinet or building a MAME cabinet for years now, but every time I do, the thought of having to move the things gives me pause. It's a pretty big pain in the rear end. Any cabinet where the control panel is wider than the cabinet itself (like mine) would need to have the control panel taken apart for it to fit through a normal doorway. The only thing you can do to make it a little more manageable is taking the monitor out before you move it.
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Oct 23, 2019 20:32
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Zaphod42 posted:I've got MAME on my PC and I have both an X-Arcade and a custom fightstick, so I've got like 80% of the mame experience already. That's the other half of it. Is it really worth building a cabinet just to have like, the presentation? The art? It's more about presentation. People always freak out when they see my name cabinet and want to play it, especially when I tell them the coin doors work and you need to put quarters in (I of course provide the quarters). I don't think I'd get the same reaction if I had just like an LCD with an x arcade stick. Most people don't even give a poo poo about the arcade 1up I have because it's not "legit". This isn't just nerds I'm friends with, it goes for my wife's friends as well. Hell, one of my first requirements when I was starting mine was that it uses quarters instead of a coin button because I wanted it to be as authentic as humanly possible.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:50
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I was worried about that too and my sister brought me down to reality saying those monitors were meant to operate 24 hours a day for 20+ years and me using it once or twice a week isn't even a blip on the lifespan of these things.
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Oct 23, 2019 22:05
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That Ghosts and Goblins is like a work of art, goddamn. See, that's exactly what I am talking about. I don't even particularly care for the game but the image makes me wanna go to hang out at your house and play it. As for the LCD; it's not that LCDs are such a bad thing; it's more that they aren't the right resolution. It's the same thing when I was looking for a monitor for my cabinet. I made sure not to get a medium res or tri res one because I wanted the games to play in their native resolution. If someone invented a 25" LCD that ran at a super-low resolution, that would be awesome! And I hear ya about the space. I regularly have dreams where I discover an unused room in my house and it becomes a full-fledged arcade room.
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Oct 24, 2019 01:43
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katkillad2 posted:I don't remember seeing the before pic when you posted in the general retro thread, that's pretty incredible The control panel was one of the easier parts. Post your setup and let's see if we can't get you a bigger control panel.
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Oct 24, 2019 12:06
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. Love how spacious the control panel is, looks comfy. Anyone else who is considering doing their own mame arcade/bartop, take comfort and ergonomics into serious consideration. It's the #1 issue with my bartop, aside from the monitor. The control panel was supposed to be 2 inches longer than what I got and it's not the most comfortable to play 
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flyboi, what's that baseball game? Looks awesome!
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Oct 25, 2019 11:26
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Pablo Nergigante posted:Looks like Super Major League 99? Hells yeah thanks, this works in mame
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Oct 25, 2019 17:39
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I just learned Brian DiCamillo from Jackass was a world record holder for Mortal Kombat for a long time (he's now fourth in the world)
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Nov 7, 2019 04:45
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The only other cab I have is an original NBA Jam machine I got for free. I need to restore the control panel though
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Nov 7, 2019 23:51
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I love em mostly because they are always somehow games I've never heard of
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Nov 8, 2019 02:54
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magikid posted:So here's something interesting. I've messed with a lot of game settings and never seen anything like this. Is there any truth to it? I forget if it was Revolution X or Terminator 2 the Arcade Game but one of them was discovered to be literally impossible to beat on one quarter. Like the game would just randomly kill you no matter how perfectly you played.
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Nov 18, 2019 04:08
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Groovelord Neato posted:This whips so much rear end and I wish I had one. I probably spent less than 1k on the whole thing. I'd be happy to help you get one together if you like! Just a lot of elbow grease.
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Jan 18, 2020 22:11
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Yeah it's a legit tmnt cabinet I'm not concerned with the power draw since it's only on when I use it. Chumbawumba4ever97 fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Jan 21, 2020 |
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Jan 21, 2020 10:46
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d0s posted:I appreciate the use of a real CRT which is imo the correct way to play old arcade games, so many people who build MAME cabs go with LCDs and it always feels so fake. if it were my cab the only things I would do differently are using a more ergonomic curved button layout for the two main players and using LS-32s in place of the Happ sticks, and Sanwa or Seimitsu buttons (if not already in use, hard to tell) but thats personal preference. it's really goddamn good and kinda tempts me to do something similar with my old SFII dynamo cab Yeah there was no way I was using an LCD. I wanted the games to look razor sharp while not upscaled. I made sure even to get a standard res one as the early 2000s medium res ones would be too pixelated (unless you were playing like NFL Blitz or something medium res). Groovelord Neato posted:I am really curious how you went about putting it together. I've been looking into a project to pick up. I bought it in shambles for $300 but this was a long time ago. You can still sometimes find them for around $500 with a monitor and no game. Long story short I replaced some of the damaged wood (this was only bad near the bottom of the unit) with similar wood from home depot. Only about 6" worth of wood near the bottom needed to be replaced. Then I had to sand then paint then sand to get all the lovely artwork off. Once it has a nice shiny finish you can put the new artwork on. The control panel is just a matter of drilling holes the proper bit size for the buttons. Then the switches in them connect to either a J-PAC or i-PAC Ultimate i/o. I have both in my machine since it's four players, but I think you can get away with just a J-PAC if you are only doing a 2 player cab. The J-Pac to me is always needed because it hooks your arcade monitor's JAMMA harness to a normal VGA video card. The machine running it is a really old core i7 desktop I had. You need a specific video card from ATI (the compatible models are very cheap on ebay) to install CRTEmudriver so that you can also use it with groovyMAME, which is a special fork of MAME that is meant for people using arcade CRTs. Then you just load it with ROMs and use a frontend like LaunchBox. I am over-simplifying it a bit but that's the jist of it and it's not as bad as it seems. I am by no means a craftsman in any sense of the word; there was a lot of wood filler used to hide my screw ups. Anyway if you need any specific information I would be happy to guide you along. Feel free to ask.
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Jan 22, 2020 21:08
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d0s posted:definitely recap your arcade CRTs, you may think you have a nearly shot monitor but unless something is really wrong a recap and calibration will have it looking new. I got stupidly lucky recently. I have an upright full-size Megatouch XL that had been working fine for a decade (I bought it in 2008 and it was probably made in 1997) that just last month started having these wavy lines all over the screen. I posted about the issue on a local Facebook retro game group. I am comfortable with messing with my 25" Wells Gardner (lots of room, chassis comes out easily) but I had no idea what kind of screen this old rear end touch screen used. No docs were online. Plus there were a lot of wires going to it that I had no idea what they did. Anyway, some dude in his 60s actually responded to my post and came by with a huge suitcase of tools. He said despite the machine being 30 years old, most of my caps were good (!!) and right there on the spot he replaced three caps his multimeter tested as bad, and the issue was fixed 100%. I told him I would gladly pay him a few hundred to replace every cap so that I don't have to worry about it for the next 30 years and he said "I'd just be ripping you off. Your old caps are high quality and any replacements you can find today would be lower quality". I was under the assumption that all caps eventually fail and he said that wasn't the case. I appreciated his honesty immensely and could not believe he fixed it on the spot. He charged me $120 but I gave him $140 (I was prepared to spend $400 because I spent dozens of hours getting this thing to work, including replacing the CD ROM drive with a CF card which due to the copy protection was almost impossible, so I was desperate). I could not believe an actual CRT repair man lived driving distance to me that did house calls and was familiar with this obscure monitor. What luck. Chumbawumba4ever97 fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jan 24, 2020 |
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Jan 24, 2020 20:27
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...! posted:Yeah, it's always nice to do business with someone who's more concerned about dealing honestly with you than trying to squeeze you for more money. Especially when your issue is such an obscure one that they could charge you almost anything since they have no competition. Yep. And his van was completely decked out with CRT-related stuff, which means this is his livelihood, which I similarly couldn't believe. So awesome. He even showed me some cart he has that plugs directly into a JAMMA hardness. It looks like a Neo Geo cart or something, but it's some self-contained MAME box that goes for like $50 and has a ton of games on it. Looked pretty cool but I doubt it could keep up with the likes of Killer Instinct and NBA Jam and stuff. The guy is my hero.
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Jan 24, 2020 22:08
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d0s posted:Unless it's a crazy rear end chassis recapping it with modern tools would take maybe 45 minutes and isn't that big of a job. I get that it's probably not much in the grand scheme of things to get the result you wanted but $120 to desolder and replace 3 caps is kinda shocking. Before I knew how to solder I paid a guy $50 to completely reflow every connection on my AV-5000 supergun and replace anything tested bad, which was like 5 caps. Again no big deal in the grand scheme of things and the lesson is really: learn soldering and basic electronics troubleshooting because it's very useful. I got into it through this hobby and enjoyed it so much I ended up doing it professionally and now I have a job I enjoy where I use those skills every day instead of being a depressed computer janitor Oh yeah I mean he definitely made good money. He was at my house for maybe 2 hours. But I think $60 an hour is a fair rate (I live in an expensive part of the country) plus this guy could have easily taken me for a ride since I made it clear I had no idea what was wrong with my display. He actually thought it was the flyback transformer from the problems it was exhibiting. I had had it in my head that I would pay up to $400 to fix this screen because 1) there aren't even replacements on ebay any longer and 2) I spent a lot of time getting this machine up and running. What happened was this Megatouch motherboard has some chip on it called RAMDOS or something like that. That chip failed (it's a pretty common failure on this board) a few months after I bought it. So somebody helped me figure out how to re-record the Megatouch Gold CD-ROM software so the RAMDOS software loads first, then the Megatouch Gold software second. Then a few months after that, the security key failed. The security key on these Megatouch machines literally looks like a coin battery with a little black stick attached to it like this:  Those are supposed to only live about 10 years. Mine lived about 20. I bought replacements on eBay but none of them worked. I know being obsessed with preserving video games like a Megatouch is kinda funny but I had a lot of nostalgia for them. In the 90s they were at all the pizzerias my friends and I used to go to. In the early 2000s they were at all the dive bars my girlfriend and now wife used to frequent in our early 20s. Plus most of those games aren't available anywhere else, especially with their iconic sound effects and graphics. So anyway I got to work trying to put the CD-ROM onto a compact flash card. I then bought an IDE to CF adapter (the Megatouch motherboard is just a 486 motherboard, but with a custom Megatouch daughterboard). It didn't work. The motherboard wouldn't even detect it. I somehow determined it was the actual CF card; a different brand worked (no clue at all how one would work and not another). The Megatouch was clearly reading the files but then spit out a copy protection error. Minutes away from giving up I got a message from someone on an arcade forum to send him a zip of my CD-ROM. He sent me a zip back and said to try it. It actually worked. I couldn't believe it. He was, as far as I know, the first and only person to have ever cracked the Megatouch software. I asked him what he did and he said he used a piece of software called "ollydbg" and that it " decompiles the binary into assembly code" and "from there it's changing certain instructions in a hex editor and getting lucky." He essentially at that time was the first and only person to have found a hack for it. I did find a video from a little while later of a hacker at a convention talking about how he defeated the copy protection at the hardware level instead of at the software level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8COSDZVR0g So anyway yeah I got stupidly lucky with this thing and I wasn't going to let it just die no matter what. Here's what my machine looks like after having the screen fixed:   Sorry for the lovely quality, my phone camera sucks. Any distortion in the screen is from the camera and isn't actually present. As for why I didn't just do the cap replacement myself: I couldn't really see any bulging caps, and I am not really sure how to tell if a cap is bad just by using a multimeter. But the bigger reason is despite being pretty good with modding (I've done the NESRGB and NESHDMI mod myself), I somehow hosed up a cap replacement on my 25" Wells Gardner. It was manufactured in 2005 and was famous for having poo poo capacitors, so I bought a high quality cap kit on eBay for that specific monitor. I carefully replaced every single cap and when I put the chassis back in and turned the monitor back on there were sparks and smoke shooting out of the back of the monitor. I almost poo poo myself thinking I ruined my holy grail of finding a brand new WG SD CRT so I sent the chassis off to get the caps replaced and luckily it was fixable but to this day I have no idea what the hell I did to make it literally go up in smoke.
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Jan 27, 2020 17:50
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flyboi posted:I have a key for the last version of Megatouch ION if you still are wanting a dongle, mine went kaboom and I had 0 interest in fixing it as it was just going to happen again with the one I had... Also the software is fully cracked, there's a person on KLOV that did it and has a page about how to patch your software - http://megatouch.arcade-cabinets.com/cracking.shtml That's a really cool offer of you but I'd have no use for it since the highest my motherboard can support is Titanium. Has anyone put out how to crack the XL series software?
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Jan 28, 2020 02:21
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Partycat posted:The megatouch posts in here are timely. I just picked up a Super IV that I will clean up and refurb - as far as I can tell it doens't have a security key that is going to die and take out the machine, just a SRAM chip. Send an e-mail to mike at oerinet.net He's a MegaTouch wizard and has all sorts of custom upgrade kits and other weird Megatouch stuff for sale.
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Feb 19, 2020 08:28
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Pastry of the Year posted:I was thinking about WWF Wrestlefest this morning for some reason, and it got me wondering: that game is basically designed to be impossible to beat without feeding it credits, right? I'm always interested in watching 1cc videos of games that ate my lunch as a kid, but I'm curious as to which games are, without tool-assists or whatever, functionally impossible to beat on a single credit, no matter how good the player is. I know Revolution X and T2 both have some very undetectable "life bleed" where you will lose a tiny bit of life as the game goes on, even if you never got hit, making it impossible to beat the game on one credit even if you play perfectly.
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Feb 28, 2020 16:08
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And Joe Pesci already had pretty good living standards before that
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Mar 19, 2020 03:43
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Is there any way through some sort of hack or something to get one button fatalities to work in the MK arcade games? I've never really heard of MAME cheat codes or MAME ROM hacking but it was one of my favorite codes ever on the snes and I would do anything to be able to do it in the arcade versions.
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Apr 21, 2020 03:11
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2reachmu posted:Mame does have cheat codes baked in if you have the cheat file plugged into your mame setup. Hbmame may have something you can burn into a rom. If that's what you're looking for. I'm not in front of my actual mame setup to tell you for sure. Thanks for the reply! Is this a situation where someone has already done "created" this code/hack and I just have to find it and enter it somehow / patch the ROM? Or do I have to learn programming or something?
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Apr 21, 2020 14:33
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d0s posted:you should be able to get the cheat database for your version of mame (iirc), google your version number and "cheats" Not finding anything for 1 button MK fatalities unfortunately :\ Thanks anyway though!
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Apr 21, 2020 17:49
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2reachmu posted:Edit: Mame does have 1-button fatalites in the cheat menu. Wait can you elaborate on this
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Apr 22, 2020 01:10
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huge thanks to 2reachmu and d0s for the instructions on getting cheats working in MAME. One button fatalities work great in MK2 arcade. I really wanted them to work in UMK3 though. It's weird, there's a cheat called "easier fatalities" but it does not elaborate on what that means and no matter what buttons I press, it does not do a fatality.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:49
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I tried playing some Carnevil today on my MAME cabinet and I noticed the audio sounded like it was warbling, like a Walkman with half-dying batteries. So I tried a bunch of 3-d games (MK4, Crypt Killer) and they were all kind of doing that. The PC should be more than able to handle some light 3-d from 1997. Could the fact that I'm using GroovyMAME on an arcade CRT have anything to do with it? Is it "restricting" the FPS to make it match the screen or something? (I am sure I am wording that stupidly). This is what my mame.ini looks like in regards to frame skipping and stuff code:
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Apr 29, 2020 02:10
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A modded PS 2 would not really work because there would be no reasonably easy way to switch between MAME and the PS2; also Carnevil was never ported to home consoles. I do use a DC emulator for House of the Dead because it simply runs House of the Dead better than MAME does.
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Apr 29, 2020 04:54
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The cool thing is I use LaunchBox for my MAME cabinet and using the DreamCast emulator is pretty seamless. The only negative was the DC emulator uses mouse pointers for the crosshairs, so I actually had to go into Windows settings and permanently change the mouse pointer to one that looks like crosshairs so it didn't look stupid in DreamCast shooting games.
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Apr 29, 2020 16:03
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So I am still trying to solve my Carnevil issue. It's not that the PC is not fast enough; it actually seems like it's running too fast or constantly switching between fast and normal or something and it's causing the game to sound and play like crap. I think I may have narrowed it down to one of two possible oddities I noticed. The first one is this:  I've noticed GraphicsSpeed dip switch settings are only weird things it seems like? The only choices are like 45mhz, 49mhz, 51mhz, etc. I was under the impression it should be something like 59 or 60? Or am I confusing this with screen refresh rates/frame rates? What the hell is a 51 mhz Graphic Speed? Then there is this as another possibility:  I have something called switchres running on my MAME cabinet; it has something to do with GroovyMAME (a fork of MAME meant for people using genuine low res arcade monitors). It looks like it's taking the 54.124000 Hz the game is expecting and SwitchRes is changing it to 57.000 hz? I am not too knowledgeable with this stuff but I tried another 640i game (NFL Blitz 2000) and the info screen said that switchres was running it at what it was expecting (so, no change) I am a little confused about the SwitchRes thing. I know it does some crazy stuff like makes a 320x240 game run at 239480928025309329209x240 or something crazy which helps make it look better on a CRT, somehow. But I also have no idea why it is changing the hz that Carnevil is expecting. I know this issue is something someone one in a million would know the answer to but if anyone would, it's this forum (this forum is where I learned about groovyMAME in the first place for which I am eternally grateful).
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May 1, 2020 20:55
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Kazvall posted:Do you have an ini set up for carnevil for GM? I don't recall making one but I guess MAME auto-generates one for every game you play? Anyway here is what I found in carnevil.cfg code:
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May 2, 2020 19:18
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Kazvall posted:Could you try -nosyncrefresh in the command line? Thank you! So just add that to anywhere in carnevil.cfg?
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May 2, 2020 21:11
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Kazvall posted:I think you need to make a separate ini file for Carnevil with just that data. Did the variable work in the command line while in game? I made a carnevil.ini in the MAME/INI/PRESETS folder, put on the line "syncrefresh 0" without quotes, and the game works perfect now! I've been trying to play this game drat near forever! Thanks so much! Any idea why this happens? Seems like it's exclusive to GroovyMAME. Am I basically going to have to create a custom INI for every single 640x480 game?
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May 3, 2020 18:54
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Kazvall posted:Nice! Carnevil was one I always loved in the arcade. Yeah I don't want to make it a permanent MAME setting because I am not sure what it will do to other games. The whole GroovyMAME/CRTEmudriver/SwitchRes thing is such a web of confusion to me.
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May 3, 2020 21:04
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Zeluth posted:I want to purchase a new HD and a Usenet account to get all the CHDs and Software Lists. For some reason I never even thought about using Usenet for mame sets even though I have a Usenet account. It seems like a lot of ROM stuff never gets uploaded there.
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Sep 7, 2020 01:54
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Coffee Jones posted:https://youtu.be/VLwa8z1AqZM I've always been fascinated by the arcade version of Killer Instinct. Especially in stages like the Glacius stage, it looks like the background is a video file. But it somehow gets bigger and smaller as you move around the stage? Sort of the same thing with the characters themselves. They almost look like a video file being played that can somehow zoom in and out on the fly.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:17
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I saw some party company on Facebook advertising that they were selling a bunch of old 25 cent rides for kids. I saw they had an actual outdoor carousel; like the kind you'd see in a strip mall or outside a grocery store, and I bought one for my kids. The thing is pretty much pure steel and I got it for $300. I'm going to leave it in the backyard 24/7/365. While I was there, I saw they had a sit-down Cruisn' USA in excellent condition and in perfect working order. Figuring they wanted over a grand for it, I asked how much and he said $400 and I couldn't open my wallet fast enough. My kids LOOOOOVE playing racing games at the local restaurants and stuff like that (even without a quarter in it). Plus I have a MAME cabinet, and the only thing it can't do is racing games. Should I try to MAME this thing for racing games? I never really heard of a sit-down MAME racing cabinet before. And from what I know, MAME runs anything 3-d like pure rear end so it would probably not be ideal for 95% of racing games. Hell, I don't even think MAME can handle Cruisn USA yet. Would love for someone to tell me I am wrong, though! But I'd be happy with just Cruisn for a really long time. Racing games kick my rear end.
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Oct 6, 2020 04:30
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This might be a little abstract but does anyone know if the seat for a Crusin The World will work with Cruisn USA?
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Oct 13, 2020 21:43
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