My first arcade cabinet!

Here she is, in all her glory!

Video Wizard Jamma Cab to 3000 game MAME Monster!

Well, this is where it all began for me. My first cabinet was a real experiment and took me over a year to complete. During the build I must have gone through just about every combination of OS, Front End, MAME version and controller config out there. Trouble is, it's never as straight forward as it should be and just when you've got one thing working the way you want it to, another thing stops!

To make things a little easier for myself I decided not to go with a standard arcade monitor on my first build. Problems with drivers and getting my PC to display a high quality picture on a 15Hz screen had driven me crazy so I opted to rip out the old arcade monitor and replace it with a nice 21" multisync I happened to have sitting around. This solved the picture problem, but I still had the controls to contend with.

I purchased a Jpac card from Ultimarc and set about configuring it to work. I got mixed results initially and although it worked I realised that I was only using half of the capabilities of the card as I no longer needed the video circuits. Before building my cabinet I had been using MAME on my PC and controling it with a joystick from X-Arcade. This unit gave excellent results and had the correct number of buttons to allow me to play every game properly. Configuration was a doddle and it also came with a handy little test utility that I could use to check the configuration and mapping of my buttons. I decided to hack this unit apart and use its control board and components in my cabinet - that way I knew it would work as expected.

The original JAMMA Cab was purchased on eBay along with a number of others. When it arrived I could see that the bodywork wasn't in great condition and it had obviously had a hard working life. For this project I decided to completely strip the cabinet to do a full restoration. This was no small job and it took no less than three weeks for me to remove all of the components (carefully labeling them as I went), repair the damaged bodywork, prime, paint and finally laquer the bodywork - inside and out. I have some previous experience in car bodywork, so this was not a major challenge for me and I have to admit that I enjoyed the cabinet restoration far more than the more fiddly job of getting the electronics to work. I was really happy with the results and it gave me a solid and clean base to begin with for the start of the build.

One of the challenges I faced was the conversion of the control panel from 3 buttons per player to 6. After examining the original panel I could see that there really wasn't the room for the extra buttons, so I decided to design my own. This I did using AutoCad to ensure that all of the holes were in the right position and that I had the correct clearance to allow me to wire everything up properly. It was a tight fit but I got there in the end. I used 12mm MDF as the base for the panel, then finished the front surface with 5mm acrylic sheet to give an easy clean and professional looking playing surface. Once this was trimmed with new T-Moulding it really looked the part and the metalic blue and silver paintwork matched the rest of the cab perfectly.

The rest of the physical build came together relatively quickly. I kept the original screen surround and marquee as they were in good condition. I replaced all of the T-Moulding with new, repaired and resprayed the coin door and fitted new rubber matting to the kick plate. All the locks were replaced with new and once the flurescent lighting had been replaced the whole cabinet looked fantastic.

Next came the tricky part - configuring the software. I had purchased a number of small form factor PCs from eBay. These were Gateway units and had a reasonable spec on them - certainly good enough to play all but the most demanding of MAME Roms without slowing down. My decision to use a multisync monitor was partly influanced by the fact that these Gateway machines were PCI and that the ArcadeVGA card I purchased from Ultimarc was AGP. Using the onboard Intel graphics chip I was able to display a great image on the multisync monitor.

The choice of OS was a little more demanding. I literally went through them all from DOS to XP Pro. DOS was the quickest and perhaps the most "pure" but the front ends looked untidy and file management was a pain. I tried loads of different Windows based front ends, but eventually settled on MameWah which I felt had the best features and looked better than the others. MameWah had problems on Win 95, 98 and ME but the OS overhead of XP made everything run slowly on the Gateway PCs. The best compromise was to use Windows 2000 (heavily optimised) as this gave good performance and all the features I needed.

A few tweaks and re-installs later I was finished. I'd built my first cabinet and I was delighted with the results.