The new monitor is excellent. 4 bnc inputs, s-video, vga, 3 audio in, 3 audio out, pc audio in. It's a CCTV monitor so it has picture in picture too.
The downside - All the controls are on the front of the display so I will need to rewire the lot and put buttons somewhere on the cab if I want control.


If it's not one thing, it's another.

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Couldn't you just cover them with a bezel?



Though obviously, not knowing the design of the monitor, i'm guessing that isn't actually practical.

That's the problem - If I cover the controls with the bezel then I need to take the bezel off to access them. I am hoping to make the fitment of the monitor more or less permanent. All of the inputs are on the side and recessed far enough so as to not be interfered with by the cabinet.

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I was thinking of something like a flip-up panel on the bezel for access to the monitor controls.

Or how about some simple dowel rods that push the buttons?

Yeah, that's all gone throught my head but i think either idea would look a bit poor. What I may go for is a row of hidden buttons on the underside of the cabinet.

Perspex turned up today but haven't had a chance to open it yet.

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Moved on a bit over the weekend with the control panel. I've cut the shape of the 18mm version and drilled it out and the same with the 12/3/3 mm version.
Perspex is an absolute banana split to work as it melts under the heat of the drill and needs to be cleared out after every hole. If the guy at the college can tidy it up and router the groove in it, the 12/3/3 version will be used.

Pix soon. Ermm, maybe

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Hmm, you know what might be sweet? A Streetfightter IV Bartop machine.

Yeah it would look really cool. I've been playing some of the older streetfighter games on my PC lately - Great fun.

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I've been ripping apart and building an old AMD Duron machine I've had sitting around for ages with the intent of trying to turn it into a PC more or less dedicated to playing old arcade games. I went with the junker approach rather than building a machine specifically for task just to get a feel for what I might actually need on the hardware front

Sadly, the machine was having none of Windows 7 for whatever reason, so I've installed Xubuntu instead, which I think may rule out letting me use the Street Fighter IV arcade stick, though ultimately I'd like a custom panel anyway

Try Windows 2000 - Great stability and should easily cope with MAME.

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Actually, Xubuntu has surprised me quite a bit in how well it's dealt with things. No problems using either the stick or Xbox 360 controllers with Xmame. Most of the simple, spriteart based games get solid 60 fps framerates in fullscreen mode - doubly impressive considering this old boards craptastic onboard audio.

I want to mount as much of the system's components as possible in the case to simplify moving it around.so i'm looking into decent speaker systems for a 5.25 drivebay, then figure out exactly what I need to do to make Linux launch directly into an Xmame session.

Doesn't SDLmame allow this to happen?

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When I launched SDL mame, it did indeed give me a launch menu, but general emulation performance was atrocious. I think I need xmame in order to use the proprietry drivers for the gfx card. And sadly the version of xmame I have doesn't seem to have an equivalent launcher to the plain SDL port. There's a Winmame style launcher program though, which can apparently be joystick controlled, if only I can figure out which device the SDL Joystick is connected to. And it's possible the plain-jane launcher IS in a more recent version of xmame, if I care to investigate and compile from source.

...To be honest, this bit is the fun bit for me. Crafting a physical cabinet is probably beyond both my space and skill restrictions, but making a custom install of Linux? Right up my particular alley - I've been looking for a project to immerse myself and increase my practical knowledge in the "hows and why's" of how Linux operates. Using a system as a basic web-desktop is one thing. Being able to customise it is another

Hmm, yeah. It looks like I'm stuck with xmame. Older mame ports provide significantly more agreeable performance on the ancient hardware I'm using.

What hardware's in your bartop, Trin?

I'm putting a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz PC 40GB 512MB Win XP HP Compaq with a 500GB ext hdd in it.
Might upgrade the gfx too, it's onboard at the moment.

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oh hells yeah, you've got the punch to get away with SDL mame. I was curious if you'd hit the same sort of snags, I'm glad to see that's not the case

I bought the PC from Ebay for £40 buy it now.


Even better, some mush is selling similar spec PCs with MAME and roms already pre-installed!!!


http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DELL-OPTIPLEX-GX2 ... 3a55596e35

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yeah, i've seen the optiplexes, but there's a fair old demand for em and frankly, if I got one, what the hell would i do with this old Duron?

sometimes you just have to bite the bullet.

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