Inside the cabinet

No concern about space inside the cabinet there is room enough for the hardware. Except maybe a SNK Neo Geo board, but I'll keep that board for another project.

First thing mounted is the power connector box and shortened all power cords.
For the TL behind the marguee,  for the audio setup, for the PC power adapter and one for the monitor.

The motherboard and J-Pac are mounted with some PCB mountingfeet.

equipment: AMD Sempron 3000, gigabyte motherboard from a former Packard-Bell pc.Wifi card,  Philips stereo soundsystem with subwoofer (he, why not :). DELL 17"monitor TFT and a really quiet DELL PSU from an optiplex GX280. 64mb AGP card (needed for performance! see previous blog message)

The wires on the harness are taped together. I advise you to do this or else everything gets messed up. I'll fix the rest of the wires after connecting the firebutton 4,5 and 6 to the J-PAC (since the standard jamma harness can only connect button 1,2 and 3). One of the power connectors from the PSU is used for Grounding (black), the yellow cable for 12v in the iluminated credit button and the red one is terminated. If i'm correct you can use the red cable if you have LED lights. The board is powered up by the button from the orignal casing, i'd like to change this to something accessible from outside of the cabinet. But for now it's ok this way.

Computer problems solved

Thanks to the help of forum members at http://www.arcadecontrols.com/ i've figured out what the cause of the performance delay was. It's the onboard VGA card.

This takes a part of processor time / memory sharing, leaving less available for MAME emulation. For that reason now the system uses a dedicated AGP VGA card 64MB.

The classic games run smooth now! thanks again, discussion can be followed here.

J-PAC problems

A small update.
I lost some time with testing the J-pac. The board I had was corrupted. Questions and answers about Ultimarc hardware can be found at http://www.mameworld.info
check this link for the problem with my hardware: Mameworld Forum

It works now with a new board. But now the second problem; the PC seems to slow to my surprise. It runs on a AMD Sempron 3000, 1.8ghz Windows XP.
Still, if you run Bagman or Donkey Kong it's so slow, there is too much delay. How is this possible since Mame cabinets are build since 15 years now or something and this PC is from 2006. If anyone has an idea please let me know. I'm going to replace the hardware next week, but i'm curious why itt doesn't run fine on this PC hardware.

Electronics, Wiring

Have to be carefull with this and not short circuit the board.

Last year I bought a 60 in 1 card for my original cabinet ( Time Pilot / Konami ). This card helped me to test the buttons and joystick since you don't have the trouble of (mis) configuring a mame engine. (and loose a lot of time).

The cabinet will be Jamma 'ready'. I like to have the oppurtunity to place a real board if I want to and stay close to an original cabinet..

what you need for this:

- A Jamma Harness
- A Jamma Harness pinout document
- Wires for ground. and Ebay some offer a daisy chain wire with clamps pre-attached.
- A joystick and buttons. 6 fire buttons, player I/II, credit button, Test Button, Service button
- A PSU ATX. A simple PC power supply will do. There are PSU's on ebay offered simular to the ones in the original cabinets.

To understand how to wire the microswitches this is a good source http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade_wiring.shtml basicly what it's all about is to place the Ground on the COMMON and the corresponding Jamma wire to the Normally Open.

The pinout, just an example there are lot on the internet. I had another one with the colors described but it was not a perfect match on the harness. It's not hard to figure out since the numbers and letters are printed on the connector (parts side, solder side)

Once hooked up to the connector power it on. To kickstart the PSU use this trick, find the green wire on the ATX connector and loop it to a black cable (pin 20 or 24)

powered on:

So fare the electronics outside of the cabinet. It helped understanding the Jamma Connector. In a next update all hardware and wires are build in the cabinet.

Control Panel

For the control panel I've choosen to give it a wood structure look. It's build of 2 layers the first of normal 12mm thick wood, the same as used for the kickplate and top of the cabinet where the marquee is placed.

The first layer is for stability of the panel.

The next layer is some piece of floor laminate. Very strong material not sensitve for scratches.

Another idea next time would be using a plastic laminate on the first layer and finnish it off with some plexi glas. That would look very cool as well and you can place some sticker art underneath the plexi.

Bizon Polymax kit/glue is use to glue both layers to eachother. The clamps hold its together for a few hours.

Next step: drilling the holes in the panel.

For this usefull information can be found at the slagcoin website, check here. It makes you think how to position the buttons and why. I drawed a raster on the panel and placed both hand on it to imagine how the postion of the buttons and joystick would be.

This is very important because if you just take a wild guess it might turn out very uncomfortable playing on the cabinet.

Once painted on the panel drill the holes with a spade bit.  Start slow and more presure during the drilling.

Now I realised both layers are too thick if you place the joystick under the first layer. The stick would popout only 2 cm! To solve this I had to cut out a square in the first layer with a chisel.

     Since the panel has buttons on top and on the frontside space can become very tight. For instance originally I had the player 1 button on the left side next infront of the joystick. But this did not fit because of the lengt of the button. It hits the joystick. For that reason P1 and P2 are moved to the right and the drilled hole is used for a credit button!

A green illuminated button, think it looks very nice. See here the endresult. In a next blog update the electronics are shown in more detail.

 

Some more woodworking

Back from vacation. Time to continue with the project.
The next action planned is preparing the t-molding with the router.
These are videos on youtube that give you a good impression on how to do this.
this one and this one. Some tips I ran into. The router bit was sold out at t-molding.com so I bought it at a woodworking shop. The type of bit you need is a slotting cutter 1/16" http://www.mlcswoodworking.com/orderstatus/html/smarthtml/pages/bt_slot.html

check your router if it's capable to mount the 1/4 or 1/2 inch shank set. Because mine didn't at first. The dutch term for this is "spantang". In europe the standard is in general the 1/2 inch. Most routers will support both but you better be sure or it will give additional costs.

It's real important to screw the bit very tight in the machine. I did not the first two times and the result was a ninja star flying around in the garage and the second time I almost screwed the whole cabinet by damaging the wood that had to be fixed with wood putty.

Another tip: do this outside or your house stinks like hell because of the smoke that comes out of the cabinet if you put the router on it. If you now think what an amateur your absolutely right nothing new here :)

I think this could be a combination of 2 reasons, one I have the router rotation set too high so the wood can't handle the warmth or it is because of the plywood as I'm pretty sure cutting in MDF goes much smoother.

But the result is what counts, here it is.