Hi all,
I was recently given a 1989 Bally/Midway Tri-Sports arcade cabinet, in complete working order. It had just been taking up space in a friend's garage and he said if I could get it out of there I could have it, so I borrowed a truck and hauled it home.
After a lot of vacuuming, polishing, and few rounds of pool I decided that this cabinet would best serve me if I loaded a PC inside it with a nice MAME collection.
There are a few issues that need addressed as far as making this thing work to its greatest potential and I'm hoping I can find some of the help I need here.
The first issue is the monitor. The one in the cabinet right now is a vertical monitor and has GunSmoke's title screen burned into it to a pretty noticeable degree. I want to replace this with either a television tube or PC monitor, oriented horizontally. The original bezel would just need a little trim to fit in sideways, but does not match the proportions of a regular monitor properly. If I were to adjust the size of the picture to display within those bounds, would I face a lot of distortion? Also, is a PC monitor the only way to go if I want to adjust the size to fit that precisely?
The second issue is the control panel. Tri-Sports uses only a trackball and two buttons. For a generic machine I obviously need to install a joystick (or two) and a few more buttons but as the current control panel is pretty thick metal, I don't know how easy that would be. I'm looking to build my own control panel but I'm really not sure where to start or how to make the final thing work with a PC.
The third issue is MAME. I have used plenty of other emulators both on PC and Xbox, but this is my first look at MAME. I downloaded it the other day along with a few roms, but only one rom was complete. Is it really that tough to come by working roms for this software? I don't want a huge library of games on the machine, but just enough of the classics to make it a nice attraction in my home.
Any help finding legitimate roms would be great, and especially help with the control panel. Thanks for reading.
Chad