That would be cool if Ed would bring a check along! I wish I had pins/more machines, we could have a gaming party . My birthday too next week, you guys could bring a pin as a present eheh
OHHHHH I got real cheap a used pc from a friend, a nice upgrade. My present cab's pc is 800mhz with I think 256 megs of ram and a 10 gig hd. This new one will be a 1.6 ghz pc with 1 gig of ram (overkill me thinks for mame...) and an 80 gig hard drive. The hard drive should allow enough space for everything I want to put on it, and the speed should be more than enough for most apps I want to run. Cool . I'm picking it up tomorrow and should be able to start getting it ready sometime this weekend.
I've been mulling over a front end for all the emulators/Visual Pinball/Jukebox. In the last couple of years, there's been a HUGE upgrade in the front end quality. I've come across 3 potential long term solutions and one temp but very good one. Although mame32UI does not support preview vids, all others do and in my opinion, they really add to the experience. They also support other emulators very well. Check out the vids below.
Temp: Mame32UI. With it's own build in front end, everything should work out ok for mame, and the beauty of my Sparkerized cab is that I know will have a control panel mouse of sort (the trackball which works fine in windows), so it should be a breaze to run everything. I'll just set up icons to run the various different emulators/apps as required.
Long term: There are 3 front ends that seem to be a cut above the rest: Mamewah, Mala and Maximus Arcade (which costs $25 bucks). I've seen a couple of youtube vids that seem to show some nice features. Mamewah is known as too complex, but very flexible and a pretty good front end. Mala is known to be as good as Mamewah, but very easy to setup. Maximus Arcade seems really well done, but jeez, there's a fee for it.
Special mention for the 3darcade front end, I'm sure you've seen it, it's quite spectacular though my present vid card in that new pc won't cut it I think.
Oh heck, here's a youtube vid of 3darcade. For those who are unfamiliar, yes you CAN walk to an arcade machine or Vpinmame and launch that particular game, then exit back to your arcade.
And Steph, what do you mean a headache... please share. Too busy of a control panel?
The comment was purely in gest , but personally, I do tend to prefer sparsity over "button-density"...
I agree that there is little choice when setting-up a 4-player fully-configured CP, but as far as I can tell, how often do you have 4 players at once.
My grand plan (...once I ever get around to building a MAME ), is to have "plug-in" swappable CPs.
ie. I'd have a few CP configurations ( single centre joystick, single track ball, dual sticks, etc...) and have a swappable CP setup with "quick-release" latches and molex connectors.
Yes, that could prove to be a bit of pain to "swap" CP's for every game, but if I can come-up with a system that is as simple to swap (ie. slide-in/slide-out) , I think I would prefer that than to have to figure out which joysticks and buttons to hit in a sea of controls.
Don't get me wrong, I think your CP looks great, ( superb craftmanship ), but for me, less is more. To each his own of course...
I hear ya... I did space everything to standard spacing specs. You don't feel cramped playing, and I have big hands. But it was to be done to have it all on a small cab...
Busy control panel or not, the guy who's going to be playing this is a pretty happy dude.
Here's another question for some of you out there, I've been reading up on "TinyXP", which is a program that rips out many of the services/apps that aren't required, which in turn makes XP run a lot quicker and better for mame cabs. Any of you have any experiences with it?
I was going to post last night but my wife started giving me mess... I looked at the clock and saw it was midnight! OOPS! Tempus fugit... especially when tinkering on a game!
Wiring is 90% done. Just have to clean it up a little, and then I test it out. The wiring is WAY cleaner than the way it was. I will post pics tonight as I finalize it. Looking good... delivery this Saturday at around 1pm.
Control panel complete. Everything wired. All I have left to do is clean it up and test the MAME. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. As you can see, the wiring is MUCH cleaner this time.
The Loafer
Male
. My birthday too next week, you guys could bring a pin as a present eheh
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