Ed: Before the article begins, I'd like to extend my gratitude to Dr Zoidberg for spending what was obviously a long time writing this article for us. The project is amazing, and we're most greatful that we can be the ones to publish the report. I hope you enjoy reading it, I certainly did. mrplow

I'd always been a fan of arcade games. It started off with space invaders, moved onto Galaga and pretty much went downhill from there. When my parents first looked at buying a computer I was only about 8 years old but I could still see the possibilities of playing space invaders at home so I talked them into buying a Dragon 32 because it had the best games. Well like the arcade games I moved with the times and ended up replacing the dragon with a commodore 64 which was itself superseded by my amiga 500 and eventually into the dizzy heights of a 486 PC which was oh so helpful for my university coursework.
The fact that it played Doom was neither here nor there.

Then however, for one reason or another I found myself playing less and less games. I couldn't really afford a better PC and they didn't really offer anything new and arcade games had turned into pound a go monstrosities that didn't require skill to complete, only deep pockets.

One day I went round to see my brother who had come back from university bringing home his PC that I had built for him and he called my upstairs and said he had downloaded something he thought I might be interested in. I wandered upstairs expecting to find a new poor sound quality MP3 file and watched him click on something called MAME on the desktop. All of a sudden his PC was playing bombjack, and it wasn't just some copy of the arcade machine, it was the game itself being emulated on a P166. We ended up sitting there till about two in the morning downloading game after game in the form of Rom Sets from a website called Daves classics then trying to remember how to play them.

That was a good four years back and Emulation software and the PC's it runs on have moved on a bit but MAME is still my favourite piece of software. It was that much of a revelation that I could find all my favourite games and play them for free that I ended up building myself a new PC that month and a constant cycle of upgrades and new downloads was begun. MAME is not the beginning or the end of emulation by any means but it is the most popular and complete system and at the time of writing this V0.60 runs over 3000 Rom Sets totalling nearly 4GB.

I had nearly every game I could remember playing faultlessly on my PC, by now a duron 950 based machine, but still something wasn't quite right. No matter how faithful the copy or how good the controller it didn't seem perfect and it was then I realised that there was only one thing I could do. I needed to have my own arcade machine. The idea had always appealed but I would never have been able to choose just one, and at several hundred pounds each buying several was a non starter so I began planning to build my own MAME based arcade cabinet.

I needed three things to make this work. First off I needed a cabinet. There are three main sources of these things each with their own pro's and cons. The most obvious is to approach a video game operator directly and see if they have any machines they don't need that they will be prepared to sell you. This will find you a workable cabinet fairly quickly but you may have to try several dealers before you find one that's prepared to deal with Joe public and they won't be cheap either. The second place I considered is a newsgroup rec.arcade.collectors. Here you get a mixture of dealers and private collectors buying and selling cabinets and boards in various quantities and conditions but again its not a place where timewasters are tolerated and it is a very fast moving place where the best bargains are snapped up almost in real time. This left auction sites with all the usual pitfalls that they bring but also the possibility of a bargain so I started scanning ebay on a daily basis hoping to find just what I was looking for.

Just what I was looking for was a reasonably modern looking cabinet in good cosmetic condition with a standard JAMMA interface and it turned up on there about a month later for the princely sum of £45 which I reckon is about half the going rate. The only trouble is that it was in Reading and I was in the West Midlands so there would be extra costs in hiring a van for the day to collect it. By the way, for those who don't know (like me 12 months ago), arcade cabinets tend to come in one of two sorts. Dedicated machines are intended for use with just one or a very limited number of game boards and have their own wiring standards and connectors and usually come with the game installed meaning a higher price. JAMMA refers to the Japanese Arcade Machine Manufacturers Association and is a standardised way of wiring up all the controls and monitor in a cabinet through a single PCB slot that allows you to change the game board in a matter of minutes. Rather usefully this makes connecting a PC to the cabinet a much simpler job.

To do this I purchased item number two, which is an interface board, called a J-Pac from a company called Ultimarc. For the pricely sum of £50 or thereabouts this little beastie plugs into the Jamma wiring harness on one side and a standard PC Monitor port and keyboard or USB port on the other side. It then maps all the arcade controls onto various keys that you can allocate to the various inputs required for MAME.
It also prevents you from doing damage to the arcade machine's monitor which is easier than you might imagine. Arcade monitors you see are very different to the hi-res display you are reading this through now. They tend to have nice large screen sizes but much lower resolutions with 640x480 often being the highest you get and need to be set up for either horizontal or vertical display depending on the type of game you are running. To change this is only a ten minute job but that can be a bit annoying when you plan to swap games regularly. They also have a much lower sync rate and if you try and feed a PC signal into them can easily be damaged. The J-pac checks the signal your graphics card is outputting and only passes it through to the monitor if it meets the required standard. Getting windows to meet the required specification is nigh on impossible but there is software specifically designed for people interfacing PC's to arcade monitors allowing them to boot up and go straight to your game selection menu. ArcadeOS is one such programme although I never got round to downloading it, much less using it.

The PC side of things was relatively straightforward. I had plenty of experience building systems and as MAME doesn't need much in the way of graphics power, only a reasonably fast CPU and decent chunk of memory for the newer games I could get everything I needed for about 300 quid and ended up aiming for a duron 800, 256mb memory, a more than adequate 20gb hard drive left over from another machine. As I said, raw graphics power was not a requirement so I planned to go for an ATI rage 128 card and it was at this stage things started to get a bit more ambitious.

My original plan was for a stand alone machine that I would load with the necessary games and software and just play away but when I looked for a second hand graphics card I found a lot of the ATI cards had TV outputs. A little light flicked on in my brain and I thought about the possibility of running the games out to my TV as well. Unfortunately for my budget, this light triggered a second one and I started looking for an ATI all in wonder graphics card. This has a tv tuner built in and full video in and out facilities and would enable me to connect the still theoretical arcade PC to my hi-fi and tv in the lounge and let me do video playback and capture. A bit more research on the subject led me to showshifter.com where I found a nice piece of software that would turn my PC into a "TiVo" type Personal Video Recorder and my mind was made up. This would be the way to go, albeit at a higher cost than I had planned. Once I decided to make this a fully functional multimedia PC as well as a games machine I realised that the arcade monitor wouldn't be up to the job and would need to be replaced with a standard PC monitor. This wasn't a problem for me to do technically, in fact it made things easier, but it would mean an extra expense.

I had found my cabinet and made a date to pick it up so set out to find the rest of the bits I would need. Shopping list firmly in hand I set off to the first available computer fair. A couple of hours of pushing and shoving my way through the crowds later and I was the proud owner of a bag full of bits including a nice black fronted cd-rom drive which I planned to fit into the side of the cabinet. I had contemplated a dvd-rom but I was never really going to need it and the twenty quid saved would pay for the network cards required to connect the arcade machine to my main PC upstairs. These were ordered from sapphire systems who I can recommend as a reliable supplier of dead cheap computer bits.

One trip down to Reading later and I was the proud owner of not one but two matching Jamma cabinets. I had originally only planned to get the one but in an attempt to defer some of the fairly high cost of van hire and diesel I couldn't resist a second which I later sold on for twice what I had paid for it.

It was at this point that I now felt more than a touch nervous. I had a full size fairly dirty arcade cabinet sitting in my lounge next to a pile of computer components and although I had a fair idea of how it would all fit together I knew that a lot of it would be trial and error. Continuing a fine tradition of pulling things to bits I started by stripping the cabinet down to as many pieces as I could whilst keeping notes of sorts on a sheet of A4 paper which I later lost. The control panel was totally disassembled and all the switches and buttons individually cleaned tested and replaced where necessary. They only use standard microswitches which are cheap enough to replace but I had been given a complete spare control panel which was a handy source of free spare parts.

Images: The mess of wires behind the controls. Nice and tidy, and clean to boot.

Mr Muscle's finest kitchen cleaner worked wonders at removing the years of accumulated grime from the cabinet and once that was done it really started to look good. I also took this opportunity to add an extra button to the front of the control panel. Much as the idea of charging my friends to play the games appealed I knew I had to have some way of adding credits without use of a keyboard and this was the easiest and neatest was of achieving this.

I removed the original arcade power supply and all the spare wiring apart from the jamma harness which was all I was going to need and checked it over fully with my multimeter looking for bad connections. With those fixed and the arcade monitor removed I now had the cabinet ready to start accepting the computer.

Building and testing the PC was problem free using a spare 14" monitor I had lying around whilst I searched for a decent sized screen. I found a dealer in Birmingham that specialised in second hand equipment and went to check their prices out. They had plenty of 17" monitors for around £70 but my eye was caught by a 21" Samsung at £145. I returned home to measure up the available space and realised it would just about fit and after a small amount of negotiation secured the screen for £125 and a set of ROMs for MAME.

I wired everything up for the first time with the pc and monitor sat on the kitchen worktop and fired up MAME for the first time. It wasn't pretty with cables running everywhere and the cabinet still half in bits but it all worked perfectly. My own arcade machine was slowly becoming a reality.
Next it was woodwork time.

Images: PC stealthed away Monitor not so stealthy

The PC itself fitted neatly into the space usually taken by the coin box and mechanism and with careful use of a saw I managed to mount the cd-rom drive so that the front panel was flush with the front of the cabinet set down low in an unobtrusive position. A couple of screws and some spare bits of wood secured the case firmly in place and then it was the turn of the monitor. The original screen was fixed to the front edge just behind the glass so I had to cut a shelf to size and screw it in place for the monitor to sit on and it was then that I realised that I had a small problem. I had measured the height and width of the space available to me but not the depth and my monitor poked out about 4" at the rear. Still it was nothing that my trusty saw couldn't fix and there was soon a monitor sized hole cut out of the rear panel.

With the major components now installed the finishing off process began. All the video playback software was installed and configured so I can now play all digital media formats and record either direct from my digital decoder or via the ATI card's TV tuner with handy features like pausing live TV. The only thing it won't do is dvd playback but as I have a stand alone player downstairs its not really needed and if I have software to install from DVD I can always use the peer to peer network connection to my main PC which also provides internet connection sharing.

For sound it was a simple job to remove the casing from a pair of cheap computer speakers and mount them to the cabinet above the monitor using the existing apertures. They aren't that good but for under a tenner they do the job and if I want better sound quality I only have to switch the stereo on. Anyway, when was the last time you were in an arcade where you could clearly hear the sound?

The marquee above the screen uses artwork by a very talented guy by the name of Romulous. His page can be found here and if you ask him nicely he may let you use the design for your own project. It was printed out on two sheets of photo paper on my Epson 660 and sandwiched between two sheets of glass from a local hardware store. The side art on the cabinet was courtesy of a friend of a friend and was professionally printed on hardwearing self-adhesive plastic. I can probably assist you if you fancy a set but be warned, they aren't cheap at that size or quality.

This is very much a work in progress and I doubt it will ever be complete. A second tabletop machine is at the design stage and there are several changes to be made to the existing system. I plan to switch to windows 2000 rather than XP and repartition the hard drive for more efficient use. Changing to an older OS seems a little strange but 2K has one useful feature that XP doesn't. It allows you to set different display properties for different users. This will let me log on as "games" with a high-res screen and the TV outputs disabled or "video" in the lower resolution but all the tivo type functions in full effect.
Strangely Microsoft decided that all users would want the same screen resolution for XP making this impossible to achieve.

I also want to add some form of remote control capability for video playback. Whilst adding an infra red sensor to the side of the cabinet would be the easiest and cheapest solution I quite fancy the idea of a second graphics card and a small touch screen lcd display to sit next to the side of the settee. Of course with that kind of control system it would be a shame not to use it to everything I can and home automation control systems are getting a lot cheaper. My whole house run by an arcade machine. Now that's an interesting thought ;-)

Images: The finished article.

Dr Zoidberg

Related:
MAMEs homepage (download here)
emulation.net/mame
Retrogames
Sys2064

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