Mousercade

The general control panel is complete and fully functional. The control panel interface is working, though the USB components and molex interconnects are not present. The emulators are running on an Athlon XP 2200+ w/ 160GB of HDD and 512MB of RAM. The display is my 32" living room TV. The control panel lives above the TV on a shelf. It can be brought down and placed on the coffee table when the nerds come out to play. The entire system is fully playable, though there isn't anything resembling a cabinet yet.

June 10, 2003

So I finally downloaded the last of the N64 ROMs as cataloged in the GoodN64 DAT file. There are about 27 gigabytes of them! It took me over a month of constantly leeching flies from my favorite ROM fileserver to get it all. And they fill up five and a half DVDs. I'm really perplexed as to why Cowering includes bad dumps and overdumps in his DAT files. If I get rid of these files (which will never work in any emulator), it cuts down on the file bloat by over 10 GB!! Perhaps I'll start publishing my own variants of the Good DATs which have no -o or -b ROMs.

May 24, 2003

The big news today is that I got my ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon to work with the arcade machine. This wasn't really a huge feat of genius or anything, I just plugged it in and it worked. But earlier it didn't and I was convinced that it was too old (AGP 2x) for my fancy motherboard (AGP 8x). But, alas, it works great. I had a good game of Gauntlet going on the TV earlier tonight. I also got the MAME 0.68 ROMs downloaded and installed. I feel like a whore for downloading the 1.7GB area51mx.chd, which is really just a combination of area51.chd and maxforce.chd, both of which I already have... but the collection must be complete!

May 22, 2003

I've got all my roms transferred onto the new computer now, with the exception of the N64 roms which I am still in the process of downloading (and the MAME 0.68 roms which just became available). It's about 30GB of roms so far, and over 100,000 files. It takes a long time to transfer that much data off CDs. I desperately need a DVD burner. Just think, if I had one of those new blue light ones, I could put everything on one disc. In other news, I hooked the Adaptoid up last night and tried it out. It is really an impressive product. It's so good that I think I'll getting a second one and a second N64 controller for two-player action. While my control panel is disconnected, it makes a reasonable substitute for most MAME games. My only complaint is that the analog joystick makes a lousy mouse/trackball substitute.

May 14, 2003

The computer components are in! I set the computer up last night. For some reason the Win2k Advanced Server installer had problems formatting any partitions on the hard drives while they were both plugged in. When I unplugged the 80G drive, it worked fine. Once the OS was in I was able to plug the 80G back in and format it within windows. Now I have all 120G up and running and the OS fully updated. Next step is to copy the old arcade machine computer harddrive over and start setting up the emulators and roms.

May 12, 2003

A few days ago I ordered an adaptoid N64-USB adapter and a similar dongle that lets me plug in two PSX or PS2 console controllers into a single USB port. I'll use these for emulating consoles whose controls are too complex for the general control panel. The adaptoid showed up today! If it works well with the computer that should be arriving Wednesday, I'll order a second one and another N64 controller (and maybe a pair of rumble packs off Ebay).

May 4, 2003

I opened up the control panel tonight to figure out what was wrong with the bad switch on Player1->TopFire->Up. Turns out I had attached the leads to NC and NO, rather than COM and NO. Fixing it took no time at all.

May 1, 2003

OK, all that stuff about Dan having the same video card was complete crap. So that worry is moot.

Also, I just ordered the hardware for the new computer!! A-bit NF7-M motherboard with a Athlon XP 2200+ CPU (1.8GHz), copper heat sink, fan, 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM, and an 80GB HDD. Can't wait to set it up!

March 24, 2003

Dan informs me that he has the same video card (the ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon) and that it is crashing his system regularly. Furthermore, he says that his online research indicates that this card is buggy and many people have problems with it. I thought my computer was crashing when I had this video card in because the mobo was old and the BIOS might have been out of date. Perhaps getting the new mobo & CPU won't fix this problem. Great... so I may be needing to pick up a new S-Video capable video card.

March 21, 2003

The knob cover came unglued from the spinner and is just sitting on it. It was really shoddily attached to begin with and was not true. I need to file off the old glue from the shank and re-glue the knob.

February 1, 2003

The player-one top-fire joystick up switch is not functioning. Not sure if the problem is with the switch, the joystick, somewhere in the wiring, or in the keyboard emulator. Need to open up the cabinet and troubleshoot this.

A full standup arcade machine with modular control panel, 27" SVGA arcade monitor, internal sound system, and integrated USB hub for attaching peripherals. The cabinet will be driven by a computer which will be external to the cabinet to allow its use for non-arcade applications. When appropriate, the computer can be placed inside the bottom of the cabinet.

The cabinet will consist of several functional units, the plan for and current status of each is discussed below:

Video:
The display will be a Wells Gardner D9200 27" arcade monitor. The monitor will be driven by an ATi All-In-Wonder Radeon AGP video card in the computer. The video card and the VGA cable are already procured. Cost to complete: ~$550

Audio:
The sound system is a Midland S4, a high-end computer speaker system. It consists of an 8" powered subwoofer, two satellite speakers, and a separate control module. The sound system will be driven by the audio hardware built in to the NF7-M motherboard. All of the hardware components for this I already own. Cost to complete: $0

Control Panel:
The control panel is meant to be replaceable to allow for rare control layouts and interfaces. The most general control panel module will be a modified SlikStik CO2 panel. It has two player controls consisting of two 8-way joysticks each, one with a top fire button, and seven buttons in a Neo-Geo layout. Additionally, there is a 4-way joystick with five additional buttons in an Asteroids layout wired up to the player 1 controls. For analog games, there is a spinner and a trackball with three buttons. This control panel is complete. Cost to complete: $0 [for first panel]

Control Panel Interface:
This device exists to convert the signals from the control panel into keyboard and mouse signals for the computer. Eventually, the CPI will have molex connectors which allow control panels to be swapped out. The PS/2 lines from the keyboard and mouse encoders as well as the RS-232 serial programming link for the keyboard encoder will go into a D-Link DSB-H4SMK USB/Serial/PS2 hub. This device takes a PS/2 keyboard, a PS/2 mouse, a standard DB9 serial port, and four USB ports and uplinks them to a host computer via a single USB line. The USB ports will allows for the addition of USB game controller adapters for console emulation, etc. This gives the option of using a Nintendo 64 or Playstation 2 controller interface instead of the control panel - especially helpful for games with analog controls more complex than the trackball/spinner can handle. Currently, the CPI is basically working, although it is permanently wired to the general control panel and there is no USB hub - the PS/2 lines go straight to the computer. Cost to complete: $0 [for single-panel, non-USB setup]

Structure:
The cabinet will house all of the above components, as well as space for the computer and [possibly] spare control panels. There is a possibility of building this myself, but more likely I will go to a arcade rental place and buy one of their broken cabs on the cheap. I need to produce my own marquee and have it printed professionally. Also, I need to integrate a keyboard drawer into the cabinet, hopefully one of the slide-out models that can go just below the control panel. I'll need to mount a power supply inside the cabinet to provide regulated DC for the coin door lights and the trackball illuminator. I'll also need to mount a master power switch to a power strip inside for controlling the power to the marquee light, power supply, and TV [I'll keep the computer powered separately so that it can be network-accessible even when the cabinet is "off." Depending on the state of the cabinet I find, I may need to sand and paint it, and replace components like the monitor bezel, glass, coin door, marquee light, etc. Currently nothing has been done for this. There is also the high-cost quickie option which would be to buy one of the SlikStick pre-fab cabinets. Not sure which route I'll take here. Cost to complete: ~$200 [DIY] or $1200 [SlikStik]

Computer:
The stand-alone computer is a reasonably modern machine that is fast enough to emulate the bulk of available roms. The connection between the cabinet and the computer will consist of:

• S-video to the TV
• RCA audio to the Midland subwoofer
• USB to the CPI