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Here she is playing Ms. Pacman
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I found this cabinet in the back of
a warehouse in downtown Phoenix. Apparently it had been sitting there undisturbed for 20 years.
The warehouse owner had originally planned to give it to his son, but
he never took it so he sold it to me. I paid him $250 for it, I was really interested in it because it is not very tall,
and is great for my small apartment. Well, since I got the other cab, I decided to go ahead and
sell this one. I've learned enough from this that I'm going to start making scratchbuilds after this.
The original monitor was a 13" black and white type, with a piece of plastic over it that was three colors to simulate colored invaders.
Unfortunately, it was fried. I've replaced it with a 14" SVGA. When I opened up the PC monitor, much
to my delight I discovered mounting brackets that are exactly like the type that arcade monitors use.
Although the new monitor is 1" larger, I was able to mount it onto it's wood frame by drilling a few new holes in the wood.
When you power it up, with scanlines on, you can't even tell this wasn't the original. There is one problem,
however, where the back
of this monitor sticks out a bit more than the first, so I had to do a modification to the wood of the back panel to make it fit and still be
able to put it on. Of course, you don't notice this problem unless you are behind the machine. I've also mounted a set of 70-watt powered speakers with a
subwoofer inside. I bought them at Fry's Electronics for $80. They are Cyber Acoustics brand, and they sound terrific, easily
as good as some of the higher priced sets out there. In order to get them to stay put, I drilled holes in the "feet" of the speakers and bolted them to the wood
inside. I had to drill some small holes in the sides of the cab to allow the sound to get out, and I put the subwoofer right on the bottom of the cab. It really makes the games come alive.
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| Behind the monitor, showing the speakers mounted. |
Bottom of the cabinet where the subwoofer is. |
The original glass and bezel are in great condition, no scratches. The control panel shows signs of abuse,
and someone has
scratched their favorite 4-letter word into it.
I've replaced the original joystick with one I made, a custom stick made from the base of a Happ Competition 8-Way, and the shaft of an old style
ball top joystick. The shaft was a little shorter than the original, so I had to shorten the spacer inside of the stick. It's was far too small to cut, so I
melted it in a nonstick pan until it was the right size. Worked like a charm, and look! No messy clean-up. I used a jigsaw to cut off two corners of the bottom of the stick,
this allows it to fit in the original
place it was. I gave the original joystick back to the operator, he had asked for it back.
I went ahead and added one more button to the layout, and a spinner. I left the
original circuit board in and added in my old PC Mainboard, a K6-2 350.
I didn't anything with the Marquee or glass, because
they look so good.
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In order to work on everything, you have to release
these clips by
going in through the coin door. Then
you can remove the Control Panel. |
Because the monitor is rotated vertically, I needed a special frontend for MAME. Since ArcadeOS
was written for DOS MAME, I'm using a frontend called CocktailFE. It's really
terrific since it lets you rotate the games menu like AOS does, but you can use it with MameW. Many classic games use a rotated screen like this, and it looks really cool.
I highly recommend this software. I used an old keyboard that I bought at a thriftshop for $5, and soldered
wires onto that for the controls. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pix of this, as I sold it just
after it was completed.
Questions or comments? E-mail me at CD_Vision (at) hotmail.com.
