Quick Status:
Last updated: Mar 23rd 2004
Playable: Very much! It's finished! (well, mostly)
Hardware: Via Epia M-10000, Soundblaster 64 PCI, Wells Gardner 19" arcade monitor, IPAC, OptiPAC
Software: DOS MAME, AracdeOS front end, Windows 98SE DOS

Welcome to WinterMAME.

My goal is to convert an original Galaga cocktail machine into a working MAME machine, capable of playing a large majority of the games I grew up with during the 80s.
Hopefully I can source the funds and build the machine before spring of 2004 comes. This is my diary of the project.

Background:

I'd been tinkering with the idea of putting together a MAME cabinet now for years, but being a software engineer automatically excludes me from having any carpentry skills whatsoever, so building my own machine from scratch was out of the question. I needed a head start, so I started looking for gutted cabinets to rework.

My other requirement was that it be a cocktail machine. While I do love the freedom of movement (and backaches) that playing an upright provides, I find them too bulky for their own good. I have no interest in playing Mortal Kombat XIV or any other game that requires much more than about a 1Ghz CPU to run on, and I didn't need the control panel size that an upright could afford me.
I'm in my 30s, I want to play 1980-90s games.

On the occasional visits to the local arcade shops, I'd been unable to find any empty cocktail machines to start my project with. The best thing I could do was to buy a working cocktail machine and gut it, but my heart told me that it was very wrong to destroy something that already worked, plus I was hoping for an extremely cheap or free cabinet to start with.

Enter the Galaga cabinet...[nov 28th, 2003]

[details here kept obscure to protect my source for machines!]
A great friend of mine, who knew that I was looking for such a cabinet just happened to mention my quest to an acquaintance of his who, as it turns out, had been working in the vending business for several years. He said that he had a few old cabinets sitting in his garage, and would be willing to let them go for $50 each.

A phone call later, and I was standing at this guy's place, peering into a garage full of gutted arcade machines. There were 2 galaga cocktails, a galaga upright, and at least 3 more cocktail machines that I couldn't identify (they were covered with boxes and other debris and the control panels were generic)
Heaven in a garage.

Not only was this a cocktail machine, but a GALAGA cocktail. Galaga was probably my favorite game in the 80s. I'd wanted a machine since I was about 12, and now I'm about to take one home with me for $50!

Of the two machines, the one closest to the garage door looked to be in the best condition. It had a glass top and the control panel was in fairly good shape. I could tell there was at least a monitor under the glass top, but I couldn't tell what else was inside the machine. The 2nd one had no glass on top and was buried under more boxes and junk than the 1st one, so we decided that I should take the one that was easier to extract from the garage. (Hopefully I'll come back for the other one soon)
It was late and very cold outside, so we quickly loaded the machine into a vehicle and back to my garage.

Cabinet cleanup...[nov 29th, 2003]

Icky. A cabinet only a true arcade gamer could love.

Over the next few days I found the time to open the machine up and clean it out. It was quite a rat's nest (literally) of tangled wires and rusty bits and pieces. Aside from the mice nests, the cabinet contained the isolation transformer, a mount or two for the mainboard (but no board) lots of eaten up wires, a big fan on the bottom of the case and a coin box. All that remained from the monitor was the tube itself, no electronics at all. After I removed the glass top, I was delighted to find the monitor bezel and smoked plexi cover to be in excellent shape.
The tube itself had some heavy burn-in that was definitely galaga in nature.

After stripping out the junk from the inside, here's what I had left:

Cabinet - in fairly good shape; no water damage at least. A previous owner had drilled a few holes to install a bar-lock over the coin door. The bottom edges and corners are a bit beat up and chipped. I don't know how to repair this kind of damage, so I might simply install some kind of metal corner brace to keep it from falling apart further.

The laminate looks pretty good to me. It isn't peeling off or ripped anywhere. The leveling feet, although rusty, work just fine. The 3 speaker grills are pretty smashed in, and I'll probably replace them as my budget allows, and it could certainly use some new t-molding, although all I'm not missing any of it.

Overall, the cabinet is sturdy and is very suitable for my needs. The mice have left it with bit of a musty/poopy smell. To combat some of this, I sanded the bottom of the cabinet as best I could, then spray painted a coat of paint into the bottom of the cabinet. I hated to make irreversible changes to the cabinet, but the inside was pretty sloppy looking anyway. Besides, I'd rather do some minor damage to the inside of the machine than have it forced out of my house for being too stinky.

Coin door - Rusty and scratched up. It has a game odometer installed. I plan on stripping and repainting it when I get some other things finished and it warms up enough to do some spray painting outside. I have not tested it for functionality. This is on my todo list.

Coin Box - Intact and in good shape

Glass top - very beat up and scratched. No longer useable, but I might take it to a glass place so they can use it to create a new one for me.

Monitor bezel/tinted plexi - Perfect! Well, almost. It's got a few scratches on the tinted plexiglass, but the damage is minor. This was a nice treat to find intact and in great condition.

7 of 8 glass top clips - a bit rusty and tired. I might strip them down and repaint them, or I might just buy a new set. Considering I'm missing one anyway, I might be forced to buy a new set. Low priority.

Monitor bracket - Doing its job just fine. Since the original monitor was still in the cabinet, the bracket was too. Appears to be in great shape. A little rust, but it cleaned up nicely.

Control Panels - The CPs are in good shape. The 2 joysticks and buttons appear to be functional. I tested them for continuity with my multimeter, but have not yet connected them to the IPAC (because I don't have one yet)
The laminate on the CPs are quite dirty and are in need of replacing. The metal control panels themselves have a bit of rust on them, and it appears the mice used the inside of one of them as a bathroom.

Both of the white plexi sheets above the control panels are dirty, but undamaged.

I ran the plastics from the buttons and the white plexi sheets through the dishwasher and they came out in tip-top shape! ;)

A little better, now that everything has been stripped out. There's still some nasty smells coming from the floor of the cabinet though.

Ebay [nov 30th, 2003]

The same weekend (thanksgiving) that I obtained this cabinet, I got the urge to see what was out there galaga-wise on ebay. I found an auction for a new Galaga under-glass artwork, and a set of new control panels (stickers and metal CP, but no joysticks or buttons).

Both auctions were by the same seller and were both expiring within a few hours of each other, and incredibly enough, the seller was local to me!!

I won the auctions, contacted the seller and was driving to his house the very next day. This project was meant to be. The seller had a spare piece of glass that he gave me, and also gave me some tips for painting and restoration work. The piece of glass I received (for free) was new, but had been cornered by hand. It doesn't quite fit the machine the way a properly machined glass top should, but it'll do for the time being. It's certainly WAY better than the original glass that I got with the cabinet.

Monitor [dec 10th, 2003]
After poking around on the build your own arcade machine message board, I knew I needed a 19 inch monitor to fit into my machine. I decided that running a true arcade monitor in my machine would be better than using a standard PC monitor for two reasons:

1) I liked the look of the original games, and it just made sense to put a real arcade monitor into a real arcade machine.
2) I already had the mounting brackets for an arcade monitor in my cabinet, so it was one less thing to deal with.

There's a local branch of Mazzco vending here in town, and they had a special for standard resolution arcade monitors for $209, new in box until the end of 2003. I couldn't resist, so I picked up a new monitor.

Reading all the warnings about working with monitors also scared the heck out of me, so I was determined to do nothing with this new monitor except install it in the mounting brackets in my cabinet, wire it up and never touch it again. Well, it wasn't quite that easy.

I figured that the brackets that came with the monitor would be the same as the existing brackets already in my cabinet, but it wasn't compatible at all. The monitor's bracket held the screen about 2 inches lower than the original, which didn't work with my monitor bezel. I had to take the new monitor out of its brackets and install it in my old brackets. Yikes. This meant futzing around with tools very close to the capacitors. After some nervous moments with me either almost dropping the monitor on my foot, or it falling onto the capacitor board, I did manage to get the monitor mounted into the original brackets, and it fit like a dream. I had to drill an additional hole in side of the the capacitor board and put a new bolt in to better hold it into place on the original brackets, but that was minor work.

In a few minutes, I had the monitor installed, the bezel installed, the artwork underlay installed, and the glass top temporarily fastened down with a couple of the glass clips. Now if only I had a way to power the monitor up and send a signal to it...

Monitor power: I didn't get a cable to hook up the molex power connector to a standard power cord, so I had to rig one up myself. I sacrificed a PC power cord, stripped it down to the wires and jammed the bare ends into the molex connector and taped it up. I then plugged the power cord into an outlet strip, made sure the strip was off and plugged it into the wall.

I physically hid behind the cabinet when I first hit the power on the outlet strip, expecting a shower of sparks to fly off the exposed monitor, but instead I got a happy sounding powering-up Hrummm sound and it was lit!

I will eventually splurge and send wells gardner the $18 for a power cord, but this for now appears to be working just fine. Just don't let any building inspectors see my work.

VGA->monitor interface:

The Wells Gardner WGE1972-H0GS39L monitor I have, despite being new in the box, didn't come with a manual at all. Luckily the web site had all the spec sheets, so I knew which pins on the connectors were the RGB signals I needed. With the help of the many pinouts for the VGA connector out there, it was a fairly simple process to create a VGA->arcade monitor cable.

I noticed that the video signal connectors on my monitor looked similar to the old AT style power supply connectors, of which I had a few old power supplies lying around that I will never use. Snip snip. I cut the ends off one of them, and now I had the wires attached to the connectors that I needed to connect to the monitor! All I needed to do now is cut up a VGA cable, ID the wires and attach the ones I needed to this connector I just salvaged.

A few hours later, one shrink tubed VGA to arcade monitor cable completed.

I created a VGA to arcade monitor cable using the old wires and plastic connectors from an AT power supply with few modifications required. Works great.

PC Hardware [dec 15-20th, 2003]

Video:
There's one drawback to using an arcade monitor with a PC: The arcade monitors use a woefully slow refresh signal to display graphics. PC monitors run at about 2x the speed, thus VGA cards typically don't support the lower end speeds that arcade monitors use. This means you can't just hook up your monitor to any old VGA card willy nilly, you need one of a select few VGA cards capable of handling the refresh rates.
Luckily, ATI video cards are one of them that works, and I just happen to have one lying around in my pile of computer junk.

This also means that running windows is pretty much out of the question, unless you have a very specific video card that you can hack the drivers to make it output in the proper mode. No can do there. I didn't have the card required, so windows is out of the question at the moment.

One more worry is that you can't (or at least shouldn't) have the video signal going to the powered up monitor even when the PC is POSTing/booting up. You can damage the monitor by sending it too high of refresh rates. Ideally I'll have some kind of monitor power switch to turn on the monitor only when the refresh rate is at an acceptable level. I can *probably* let my machine boot up into DOS and into arcadeOS (which supports the correct rate) without the switch. It takes about 15 seconds for my machine to boot into DOS. Not being a linux geek (yet) I've decided that DOS it is. I'm currently running DOS MAME and arcadeOS as a front end to it. There are lots of web pages dedicated to setting up DOS MAME and arcadeOS, so I won't go into it here, but just know that it's somewhat tricky to configure. Deal. You'll learn a lot.

SOUND:
Since I'm running in DOS, I needed to use a sound card that had legacy Soundblaster compatible modes. Again, the old computer scrap heap to the rescue. I dug up a SB64 PCI card and located the drivers on the net. It's an Ensoniq card with a 1371 chip on it.

MOTHERBOARD:
Originally I was using an old Pentium II 400MHz machine to play Galaga on, but its kinda slow and bulky. I then got the idea to try my VIA EPIA M10000 motherboard, which I had tucked away for a different project, to see if the onboard video could output to an arcade monitor. Yes indeed it can! The M10000 has 1 PCI slot which is all I needed for the sound card. (the onboard sound on the M10000 has no legacy sound support, and as far as I can tell, no one has ported MAME's audio software to work with the non legacy 8235 southbridge that it uses. Alas, for now.)

In just a few hours of configuring MAME and arcadeOS to output things to my monitor and rotate them into the proper orientation, I was playing my first Galaga game with sound and everything. I haven't hooked up the joysticks/buttons yet, but it was fun to play even with a keyboard.



My first game on the arcade monitor. I'm still using the keyboard at this point. Sorry about the crappy photo.

So, now I'm running a tiny 17x17cm board at 1Ghz using only a few watts of power to play many, many, many games with. The Via EPIA boards are an ideal solution for oldskool arcade gaming! I have more than enough room to install the board, a hard drive and power supply inside my cabinet. Heck I've got lots of room to spare. There is also little or no heat generated by this motherboard, so I don't have to worry as much about thermals inside the cabinet.

I have not yet tried games later than about 1985, so I don't know where the 1GHz CPU is going to conk out. My guess is that it will play virtually any game that I have any interest in playing.

Happy Holidays and stuff.[dec 24-jan 6th, 2003]
Spent some time off. While I was out, my IPAC was delivered. (I ordered an opti-pac too, in hopes that someday I'll attach a spinner)

The weather has been rather forgiving and we've hit a few days above freezing. I spent a couple nights in the garage with some helpful friends "feelin' minnesotan" by working in an ice cold garage at about 8pm, a couple drinks in all of us, grinding old paint off the original control panels and spray painting a few other parts. Despite painting at near freezing, the paint job looks pretty good. Might do some touchups later. Hurray for rustoleum hammered finish.

First IPAC test.[jan 8th, 2003]
The Ultimarc IPAC is a keyboard controller/passthrough and it looks like this:

It allows you to attach the wires coming off the joysticks and buttons and converts them into standard keypresses. You screw the wires into the various terminals, then attach a PS/2 cable to the PC and it pretends that when you move left on the joystick that you're pressing the left arrow key. It works flawlessly and even has a passthrough so you can attach a normal keyboard to it as well, so that you can quit MAME, do some DOS editing and then play some games without having to rewire or unplug anything. Brilliant! They also have a device to hook up a spinner or trackball and plug it into the PC's serial ports.

I unpacked the IPAC and couldn't wait to hook it up, despite not really having all the gear I need (like a soldering iron) handy.
I attached the original wires directly off one of my joysticks and buttons to the IPAC just to see if it was as easy to hook up as I had heard it was. No sweat. The IPAC has labels on the circuit board that tell you "player one left", "player 1 button 1" etc. You don't even need a soldering iron to attach the wires to it, just a screwdriver.
I attached the a joystick and button to the original control panel and temporarily mounted it in the cabinet and played my first game. Then my second. Then a couple more.
After an hour or so one of the wires on the joystick fell off and I could no longer move left. Oh well, it was a taste of things to come. The IPAC is such a cool thing.

Mounting the hardware.[jan 11th, 2004]
Got the main PC hardware installed in the machine permanently.

FAN:
The original cabinet had a 120mm fan installed, so that's exactly what I've done as well.
I don't recall how the original fan was mounted in the case, but I found that a standard 120mm fan you can buy anywhere fit perfectly in the hole provided. I cobbled together a couple of metal clips to hold it in place. The power lead will attach to the PC's 12volt connectors eventually.

HDD/FLOPPY:
Next up was a way to hold the hard drive in place. I grabbed a hard drive cage from an old AT case that I had in the junk pile, and mounted a drive bay rail to the inside of it. The reason for this rail is to hold the drive up on the 1 side that is closest to the cabinet wall, because I will never be able to get a screwdriver in on that side when the cage is mounted in the cabinet. The hdd cage will be screwed to the bottom of the cabinet, upside-down from the way it was mounted in the original PC case.

Here's the cage installed in the bottom of the cabinet. I threw a floppy drive in there too because I had one available.
Screws on one side of the cage hold the drives in, the drive bay rail holds the drives up on the side that I can't get to with a screwdriver.
I decided to throw a ground wire on the cage as well just to keep everything on the same voltage plane. Couldn't hurt I hope.
The standoffs mounted in front of this cage are standard motherboard standoffs screwed directly into the wood of the cabinet.


MOTHERBOARD:
After installing 4 standoffs, the board dropped in painlessly enough. What was pretty amazing was that along the back side of the cabinet itself were two wooden wedges used to strengthen the corner joints. The EPIA motherboard fit EXACTLY between these 2 wedges.


POWER SUPPLY:
I couldn't figure out a way to mount the stock ATX supply because it only had screw holes for putting bolts into it through a metal chassis of a standard PC case. I then remembered seeing a tiny bracket on that old AT power supply that I keep mentioning. It was just a little angled piece of metal that had two little flanges for bolting it into a case. I stole it off the AT power supply and mounted it onto the ATX supply. I had to drill and tap a few new holes in the supply's case to be able to mount it, but that was pretty simple work. When I first mounted the supply in the cabinet with only the front screwed down, it was a tad wobbly still, so I drilled a new hole in the back of the supply and attached another L shaped piece of metal to the back, so now it's screwed into the cabinet with 3 screws and is very stable.

Birds eye view of the entire PC hardware mounted in the case.
Everything fit like a dream, and I have lots of space left over for the Ipac and OptiPacs. Dunno what I'm going to cover that hole with.
A couple cable ties and it should be finished.
It's difficult to see, but the mounted fan is directly in front of the hard drive.


Swappable Control Panels.[feb 09th, 2004]

I'd been spinning my wheels for several weeks now trying to get a quick method of swapping out the control panels on the machine. Considering the control panels on a midway cocktail cabinet are only a few inches wide, there was absolutely no hope in getting all the joysticks, buttons and trackballs I'd need mounted in one single universal panel. (I personally think those look pretty stupid anyway) My plan is to build between 4 and 6 separate panels to accommodate the range of games I want to play. Swapping them out quickly and easily without having to open the cover (I want to swap while the machine is still on) is required.

After several failed attempts and schemes that involved parts that would have to be machined, I think I've finally come up with something that will work.
I picked up some round headed screws and some L brackets at home depot, and mounted the L brackets on the inside of the sides of the control panel like this:

A 1.25" L bracket mounted inside the back of the control panel carcass. A metal sleeve on the inside of the actual control panel, mounted through the holes that hold the control panel overlay sticker down.
The CP itself will sit on top of this bracket and the metal sleeve fits inside the hole on the top of the bracket, securing everything.

I then screwed some threaded 0.75" long metal sleeves to the inside of the control panel. I picked up the metal sleeves at a fantastic local store, Axman surplus for 5 cents each. I used the holes that were already in the top of the control panel that are used for holding down the control panel sticker down to mount the sleeves to.

I can now drop the control panels down vertically into the L brackets; the metal sleeve drops right through the top hole of the bracket. The fit is extremely secure and I can swap out a panel in about 15 seconds, with the machine powered up and monitor lid closed. Perfect!
The white plexi is mounted permanently to the back of the control panel and does not disconnect with the control panel itself.


For the cable hot swapping, I used a VGA extension cable to serve as a connection point.
First I wired up the IPAC to 1/2 of the VGA cable, and the other half of the cable to the back of one of the control panels. It's pretty ugly, but it works.


A VGA extension cable serves as my connection point between control panels and the IPAC.

I mounted the IPAC on the side of the cabinet under the player 1 control panel location. This makes it easy to get in and plug in a keyboard when the cabinet it closed via access from the coin door. Player two has not yet been wired up here, but I'll just do the same thing and route a longer section of VGA cable to the other side of the cabinet. Eventually I'll be making a player 3 and 4 control panel which hangs off the cabinet above the coin door, but that's work for another day.

I used a VGA connector because 15 wires should be enough for about everything I'd need to do one 1 single control panel. Since a common ground is shared for all joysticks and buttons, I can have 14 signals with this connector. That's enough for one 8 way joystick and 10 buttons, which is more than I can physically fit on any control panel.

I've got 8 buttons and a pair of T-stick joysticks on order from ultimarc coming soon, and I picked up 2 completely blank control panels. In a few days I will be ready to create my main control panels. For now, I'm stuck with the pair of 2 way joysticks and 1 button each. Oh well. I'm getting new high scores on Galaga almost every night I play with this.

Configuration and Swearing.[feb 10-26th, 2004]

In the mail, I finally received a pair of T-sticks from ultimarc, a bunch of buttons, and some blank control panels.
I now have 6 control panels at my disposal: the 2 original galga ones, 2 that I picked up on ebay which were also configured for Galaga, and 2 completely blank panels.
I decided to sacrifice one of the ebay panels to my whims and cut a few more holes in it for extra buttons. I didn't need 4 panels that supported only Galaga, and I needed to experiment with something real that I could mount in my cabinet to see if it would work at all.

I picked up a 1 1/8" drill bit, crossed my fingers and cut 3 additional holes in my control panel as well as converted the slot opening for the 2 way joystick to allow for 4/8 way stick to be mounted there. Naturally, the mounting holes for the joystick didn't match up to the holes on the original panels, so I had to drill some extra holes for the joystick mounting as well.

Here's the fruit of my labor

4 buttons, a switchable 4/8 way joystick and 2 new player 1/2 start buttons I picked up from radio shack for a couple bucks.

It's not a great job by any means, but it works and lets me try out a lot more games than my previous 2 way/1 button control panel I was using before.
When I go about making the real control panels from my blanks, I'll more than likely move the stick over to the left another inch or two, which will allow me to add 2 more buttons so I can play most of the fighting games (which I have no real desire to play anyway)

After getting everything wired up, I spent some serious time configuring and learning the quirks of arcadeOS and, well, trying out lots of games for extended periods of time! ;)

Then disappointment set in. I've found that many games, key games that I NEED to be able to play, are not supported by my onboard video card with dos MAME.
Galaga, frogger, ms-pacman, kangaroo, and dig dug (and others) come up perfectly and play very well.
Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong jr, space invaders and many others, do NOT work. I get a very small image, 1/2 cut off on the bottom, and completely unplayable.
Ugh.

I put the ATI video card in (sacrificing the soundblaster card because I only have 1 slot) and the above games popped up perfectly. The onboard video on my motherboard is only partially supported. Argh. This means I have to either find a PCI riser card to allow me to use 2 PCI slots on my board so I can use both video and sound, OR swap out the motherboard altogether (a step backwards in my mind) OR, attempt to get advanceMAME working with my hardware. AdvanceMAME has lots more video options and settings, which I strongly believe can make it work. Because I'm a software guy by day, I always think software is the thing that can be changed the easiest. We'll see as I spend some quality time with the configuration tools.

My first attempt at advanceMAME didn't go so well. It doesn't support my video hardware either. In fact it supports it less than standard DOS mame does, so I need to research on the web some more and see if anyone else has struggled through this before. It's unfortunate that my machine is so very close to being very playable, and I'm stuck in a rut with hardware that isn't supported. (yet)
I may have to just deal with a limited number of games for the moment and concentrate on other aspecs of the machine, such as wiring and refurbishing the coin door.

Frustrated.

Configuration and Playing![feb 27th-mar 10th, 2004]

After moping about for days and trying to figure out what I was going to do about my hardware incompatibility problems, I spent some timing wiring up the lights that go above the control panels on the inside of the white plexi. The bulb sockets were still in the original cabinet for both player 1 and player 2, but of course the bulbs were shot. I found some 14 volt bulbs at radio shack which fit in the sockets, and could be powered by 12v with no problems. Of course I paid about 10x more than they're worth. I'll buy a box of ten when I make my shopping list for other parts I need.

I wired the bulbs to a standard PC power supply connector and plugged 'em right into my power supply. Works like a champ. I'll need to do the same thing for player 2, but some other day.

I also pulled the coin door apart and removed all the mechanics from it and prepped it for painting. I found a quarter inside one of the coin mechs, so I now have a lucky 25c piece that I can use to fire up my first official game of MAME when I get it all put together.
The coin mechs appear to be working just fine, and the only real damage to the coin door was that some punk took a screwdriver to one of the coin slots. I managed to bend it back into reasonable condition.
The faceplate on the door is pretty scratched up, but I don't see a way to repair it, or even replace it. It's pop rivetted to the door.

All the replacements I've seen on the web all have the wrong logo for midway anyway. Mine says "Fun is our business"

The coin door stripped and with a fresh coat of paint. Hurray for rustoleum hammered paint.

Back on the software front, I did some research as to what games had problems with what video modes, and I soon figured out that the onboard video on the epia board can't handle certain resolutions if the color depth is too high. (too high being more than 64!)

So, donkey kong, which supposedly uses 256 colors (although I don't know WHERE those colors are) won't run on my machine. However, if I change the MAME "DEPTH" setting from "auto" to a value of 8, the game works perfectly. Am I missing any colors? not that I can tell.
In fact, if I understand this setting properly, a depth of 8 should be exactly 256 colors, so I shouldn't be missing anything. Why it doesn't work in "auto" mode is a bit of a mystery currently, but I'm too busy celebrating to care.

This little trick worked on dozens of games that I had written off completely. Newer games that do indeed use thousands of colors will probably be off my list of playables, but there honestly aren't that many that I care about.

I've also found that even having a control panel with 4 buttons on it, I've not yet found one that I want to play (vertically) that uses that many. When I get around to creating a player 3 and 4 control panel on the horizontal side, I'll certainly have at least 4 if not 6 buttons available.

Right now, I'm *extremely* happy with the selection of games I can play with this simple setup change.

Perhaps when advancemame catches up to support this hardware (if ever) I'll switch and see if I can squeeze a few more games into the list, but for now I have thousands of hours of playtime ahead of me.

To make life even cooler, I found that my motherboard's BIOS has a nice feature to power up on any keypress. I can now power up my machine just by pressing the player 1 start button. The only problem is that it requires constant power to be on the machine (even though it's off, it's never really OFF) So I've decided that I'll have "always on" power internal to the cabinet and wire the monitor's power supply to the original on/off switch located under the cabinet. I'll probably route a real on/off pushbutton for the PC somewhere outside the cabinet so I can force it on/off without opening it up. There's so many holes in my cabinet that there should be no problem hiding a toggle switch somewhere.


I wired up one of the original galaga joysticks and buttons to a control panel, and put my overlay on it as well. Now I have 2 (of 6) control panels finished. In the next few days I'll be planning out how I want my other CPs laid out. I want a trackball and spinner CP at least, and will probably wire up one with a true 4 way joystick for better donkey konging.

my todo list:
1 more coat of paint on the coin door
rebuild coin door
wire coin door to ipac, add lights behind 25c windows
wire player 2's control panel lights
cable tie and wrap all internal wires
replace speaker grills
add corner protectors to cabinet to hide earlier abuse
find/install a powered amplifier for sound
hack apart an outlet strip so I can use 1 cord externally
wire original on/off pushbutton to monitor
lay out/configure and wire extra control panels
figure out a method for adding player 3 and 4 to my machine!
play play play and play some more

Sound and lights[mar 15th, 2004]

Ah, the finishing touches. Well, almost.
Spent the weekend wiring up the lighting for player 2's control panel and zip tieing down most of the internal wiring. I picked up a cheapo set of speakers from compUSA and gutted them so I could mount the speakers internally and have the control board (on/off, volume, tone controls) available without opening the cabinet. Instead of punching more holes in the side of my cabinet to allow for volume adjustments, I mounted the speaker control PCB directly behind player 1's control panel. All I need to do is lift off the CP and all the controls are at my fingertips.
Luckily for me, the speakers are powered by 12v. I'll be hard wiring them directly to the PC power supply, eventually, but for now it's just plugged in using a standard wall wart. This makes 3 things that are plugged in at all times: PC, monitor, speaker power supply.



Here we see the inside of player 1's control panel. A new set of lights for illuminating the controls, the VGA cable quick-release for swapping out the control panels, and the circuit board for the sound amplifier. All I have to do is remove the control panel and the full range of audio controls are right at my finger tips.

At home depot, I found a 3 way outlet which simply plugs into an extension cord and allows 3 things to be plugged into it. It's made of soft plastic and I found I was able to screw through it and mount it directly to the bottom of the cabinet. I'm sure my hacking on this thing would make any electrical inspector's heart skip a beat, but I verified with a multimeter that my wood screws didn't come into contact with any internal electrical connections.

My plan is to have the PC and speaker wall wart powered up anytime the cabinet is plugged into the wall. The PC has power management "off" which then allows the PC to be turned on via the press of any button on the control panel. The monitor will be power on anytime the original pushbutton switch located on the bottom of the cabinet is switched on.

I can have the batch file that launches arcadeOS at startup then call the "off" program that is bundled with advanceMAME to turn off the PC when I'm finished playing games. I just have to remember to turn off the monitor by hand.

After a final coat of paint for the coin door, I've started re-assembling the components on it. Provided I remember how everything goes back together, it should be finished next update. I'll then need to figure out how it's wired, run 12v over to the lightbulbs behind the 25c signs and wire the coin triggers over to the ipac, and it'll be ready for some real gameplay.

The coin door re-assembled and powered up. Too bad my cabinet has those holes where the lockbar was located.


my todo list: (revised)
finish building coin door
wire coin door to ipac, add lights behind 25c windows
replace speaker grills
add corner protectors to cabinet to hide earlier abuse
wire original on/off pushbutton to monitor
lay out/configure and wire extra control panels
figure out a method for adding player 3 and 4 to my machine!
play play play and play some more

Wiring and celebrating[mar 21st, 2004]

Today, on the 1st official day of spring, I announce that winterMAME is finished. Well, ok, are these things ever really finished?

Did a lot of clean-up work on the internal wiring today. I've mounted the coin door, wired up the coin mechs to provide credits to MAME, powered up the lights behind the coin slots, hard wired in my speaker system, mounted the speakers, and wired the 12v amplifier to the PC power supply. (no more wall wart)
I've also wired the monitor to the original pushbutton switch on the bottom of the case, and cable tied everything down to the side of the cabinet. My back is absolutely killing me because I've spent so much time hunched over working on the machine. I don't know how these guys were able to build these things on the assembly line.



The finished(?) wiring, bird's eye view. Pretty much everything is tacked town that can be. It should at least survive moving.


It is now completely functional to the point of being able to put it aside for awhile and just play it. Aside from building more control panels and doing a few more minor cosmetic changes to the outside of the cabinet and ROM updating, the game fully functional. I'll be throwing a party in a few weeks and it'll get its first real world test, and I'll probably get a few ideas for improvements from there.

This will probably be my last update for awhile. I'll add pics of new control panels that I'll be building, but that's about it.
A wrapup for the project:
Goal: Convert an old galaga cocktail machine into a working MAME machine, capable of playing hundreds of different games.

Outcome: Complete! The game plays hundreds of games, has swappable control panels, and can be converted back into a dedicated galaga machine if ever needed. I performed no changes to the physical cabinet other than cleaning it. All modifications were done internally and can all be undone. In fact with both of my galaga control panels in place and the machine running Galaga roms from MAME, you'd be hard pressed to know it had ever been modified.
Future revisions will include a control panel to be mounted above the coin door to allow for playing horizontal games and also allow for 4 player games such as gauntlet.
This player 3+4 control panel will also be removable, with no hardware changes required to the cabinet. I've got to do a little bit of engineering to figure out the mechanics of it, but I know it's possible.

Some final pics:

and one last look at where the machine came from...