Posted by Bugfinder on 9, 2000 at 3:13 AM:
Hi guys :o)
I've been around emulation world since mid-1997 and always wanted to build my very own arcade to play emulators on it, mainly MAME. Only lately I got the necessary stuff (read: money) to start my dream. Now I need some advice from you who already have completed an arcade conversion project for use with emulators. I actually visited some sites about this matter, like Build Your Arcade Controls FAQ (www.arcadecontrols.com) and Build Your Own Arcade Machine Page (http://plaza.powersurfr.com/kevin/arcade/). I wasn't much sure about what I was going to build, and these sites helped me to decide. Many thanks Saint and Kevin for your brilliant compilation work :o)
The PC and Console to JAMMA page (http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/) also showed me some interesting information about arcade monitors. I need much help and advice from you who already passed by these problems. I would like to count on with your experiences in order to save me unnecessary trouble. Someone once said, "The 'experience' is much like a car going in a desert, dark street with its lights only in rear". I want to learn from your bad experiences, but mostly from your successes. Thanks in advance to all of you who are willing to help me.
I have in mind an arcade cabinet with one joystick and seven pushbuttons (one for start) for each player, and to make it accepting coins (the latter is not a must, just desirable). No trackball, no complicated joysticks. I must confess I don't even know the difference between a digital and an analog joystick... Many sites talk about it but I still haven't figured it out yet :o( My idea is to put the minitower inside the arcade cabinet, fixed in a way it can't be damaged by moving the cabinet around.
My main problems at this moment is to decide 4 things:
1) I've opted for using an AMD processor; how much horsepower to put into the PC? I want to know if a K6-II 500 Mhz (550 Mhz maybe?) is enough to run all Neo-Geo games with full sound (44 Khz) + 16 samplebits plus 95% of the other games - exceptions are, of course, Williams 34010 games. Should I use a K7? I know that a Pentium III or K7 800 Mhz are necessary if you want to play Williams 34010 games, but these are not my ambition at the moment, only Neo-Geo and all other not-so-hungry games.
2) Same question applies to memory. Is 128 Mb PC-133 enough to play everything with sound or should I buy 192 Mb, 256 Mb?
3) Which are the recommended video cards to use with arcade monitors? This is very hard for me to figure, and although I've found lots of sites explaining about arcade monitors, some of them were a little outdated about video card models. PC2JAMMA shows many VGA modes with frequencies varying (50 Hz, 57 Hz, 60 Hz) and it says MAME drivers for arcade cabinets are based on ATI videocards. It says generic drivers *might* work with other chipsets but I'm not willing to run any risk. At the moment, ATI cards I can find in my country are different from the ones presented at that site. The ones listed as fully working are: ATI 3D Rage II+ - ATI 3dExpression PC2TV - ATI Xpert@Work - ATI Xpert@. Also Matrox Mystique and G100. From what I know, Matrox Mystique has been discontinued and G100 series had an evolution to G200 and more recently, G400.
I was going to buy a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP when I discovered that no 3dfx cards would work correctly in an arcade monitor, thanks to PC2JAMMA page. I want one that has the best 2D/3D performance, which works great with 3D emulators (N64, The Impact!, Bleem) and - most important - fully works with arcade monitors. And the economy factor: I don't want to spend my hard-to-get money to buy a "Super 3D Videocard VII 64 Mb UltraRAM" if a Matrox G200 16 Mb is just enough for what I intend to do, capice? :o)
4) The most troublesome aspect of all this: to hack a keyboard or not to hack a keyboard. I understand as much about electronics as your momma understands about spacecrafting (I hope your momma doesn't work at NASA :o))) Seriously now, I saw some pages talking about opening the keyboard, pictures showing the inside of it, full of wires etc. I got a program called Key Jammin' to see which keys I could map to the pushbuttons and joysticks. I really would like to build a hack that would let me press all 14 buttons at same time, plus any combination of diagonals on both joysticks without any key blocking or ghosting; and the ability to connect a keyboard and use it normally to change some configs at my will. Some people have done this in a way or another but they all start to explain things having in mind the reader understands about electronics and all that. My English is horrible when it comes to understand technical terms :o( I'm lost on all this. Where can I get more information about keyboard encoder? I never saw this for sale in Brazil. Which model is worth of importing from Hagstrom Electronics?
If you've got patience to read all this, much thanks. If you're willing to help me, more thanks.
Bugfinder