Thus begins my oft delayed MAME cabinet journal. It is heavy on pics, so watch out. The journey begins when I move into my new house, whose previous tenants purchased a Marvel Vs. Capcom arcade cabinet which they now wish to sell. I purchase the cabinet in fine working condition for 300 dollars, and begin to think about what I can do to it. I start looking at MAME sites, and while I fully understand how mame works under windows, I'm not very familiar with DOS MAME.

Here's a list of the sites I started out with:

http://www.mameworld.net/
http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/
http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/
http://www.ultimarc.com/

These sites will cover almost everything you need to know. I started out by looking at how to connect my PC to my Arcade Monitor (A philips standard monitor). It turns out that although arcade monitors are running computer hardware, they are doing so at 15khz horizontal frequency; PC monitors run at 31khz, which means I can't connect them without the proper software and hardware. In other words I needed a card which could output a signal low enough, and drivers to tell the card how to do it.

The second thing I needed was a method of connecting my controls from my Cabinet into my PC. The most common and oft heard method is to take apart a keyboard and solder the wires from the buttons and joysticks to the keys. I wanted to avoid problems of ghosting (where pressing two keys results in a third key being pressed. I also looked at different hardware solutions since I'm not exactly a soldering wizard. In fact, at NO POINT in this entire MAME cabinet journal do I do any soldering.

The third hardware problem was that the coin mechanisms didn't work. I took at look at them, disassembled them, and after a little toying around, I was able to get one working with a little tweaking. The other one wouldn't work, and I decided to replace the assembly.

Finally, I needed to add a sound system. The current setup only had one speaker, which was attached to the JAMMA harness. according to the MAME sites I was visiting, there is a powered mono speaker spot on the JAMMA harness, but it is easier to cannibalize a PC speaker setup. So I would have to disassemble a spare stereo system and mount it in the speaker spots up top behind the marquee.

The cabinet used a JAMMA harness, which I hoped would facilitate an easy transformation, and because of that, I began looking at Ultimarc's hardware solutions.

I finally decided that a Jpac would be the best solution for all of the above problems. That still left the software solution, but we'll get back to that. Here are some pics:



Here's the cabinet with the control panel removed. On my machine you can release two latches on the control panel through the coin door, and it flips down. The control panel is attached to a piece of wood that slides into the cabinet at an angle, and in this case had the CPSII board attached to it.



The whole piece slides out for easy maintenance. It attaches to the monitor and power supply with just 4 harnesses. I got lucky because this cabinet was a breeze to work with at the beginning. Eventually I will mount the PC to this board once I've finished making the MAME cabinet self contained.

I took off the CPS II board, ordered a Jpac, and removed the speakers from my spare powered speaker set.

NEXT: Buying Parts, installing the speakers, testing the Jpac and the PC, figuring out the software.