that's what she said

Sweet thread

Wow, I was looking at this thread today too.

I'm building a cabinet and have started to do the research. An electrician will be involved in the building process, so we're going to go with a 100% custom 4-player deck with track ball.

From earlier in the thread, I've gathered that "Happ" is the button to buy, and "iL" are the joysticks of choice.

Anyone know of a reputable place where I'll get legit ones and not some towel-head knockoff?

I'm also still debating if I want to drop the $400 on a "real" monitor or not.

Quad, how is yours holding up?

happ is the standard buttons at american arcades with the hard push and the sticks you mention are generally tighter in the spring. I personally prefer sanwa buttons and joysticks, they're quieter and much more responsive/sensitive... but its all a matter of preference

also, fastest shipping/most reputable place i've bought from is http://www.lizardlick.com theyve got great customer sesrvice

SOOOOO Sick...

I've just discovered the whole MAME thing, like just last weekend (Welcome to 2000 right!?) anyway - I now know I simply must have one of these.

Thanks OP.... so much planning to do now.

Sarge

I haven't started on mine yet, but I really need to.

I will be documenting absolutely everything that I spend and where I obtained the parts and will post here when it's done.

It's going to be a 4 player machine, if for no other reason than TMNT and Simpsons.

That reminds me. I'm gonna make another video of the thing for historical purposes. The one I took before and posted was with it only 97% complete. It looks much better with the marquee etc. Will give me something to do today.

Here's a video with the marquee and everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaFeLfnW0J0

4 player NBA Jam as well will be amazing. Friend of mine were just playing the 2 player version and forgot how intense the fun is on that one.

Last post I promise. Finally a picture of the completed machine ITT.

How did you cover the gap next to the controller? I have the same issue with my tankstick. It looks like you found a piece of plastic somewhere?

I'm glad you asked that, it was a trip to home depot that solved that problem. We went without any specific idea and wandered the isles, thinking there must be something we could use.

What we found was a wooden door threshold, that thing on the ground in the doorway that seals the gap.

Looks like this:
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1...atalogId=10053

Turn it upside down. Cut it to fit. Paint it. Attach it with a long velcro strip. You'll be smiling at the results.

One more question - how do you have the remote control turning everything on? I understand how it powers up the TV, light, speakers but how is it turning on the PC? I too am using GameEx so I have no problem powering down but I am trying to figure out a "clean" way too easily turn everything on. Thanks...

There is a selectable setting in the motherboard bios on the computer that says something to the effect of "Power up Computer whenever it receives power" or something like that. I can't remember the exact wording.

When that setting is selected, any time the computer is plugged in, it will automatically turned on. Thanks to the Smartstrip powerstrip everything is plugged into, the computer does not think it's plugged in until the TV is turned on, so turning on the TV with the remote effectively plugs everything into the wall at the same time.

"Restore on AC power loss" is the common name for it in bios

That sounds familiar that's probably it.

Epic bump for game emulators.

I've spent basically 100% of my free time (including ~12 hours on both Saturday/Sunday) for the past 6 days laboring over a retro console emulator that I'm building.

Instead of a giant Arcade machine, this one was built with a mini-ITX motherboard and is essentially the size of a VCR. I was originally going to mod a Super Nintendo case to house it, but after tearing apart the console and seeing how things would fit, I decided against it.

I'm hoping to be totally finished with it tonight or tomorrow, and then I'll spend another evening doing a writeup for 2p2 nerds with extra money that might want to tackle such a project with as much detail into the process as I can offer.

Last night I finished setting up my custom menu, which was one of the final steps in the process:

http://i.imgur.com/lLdea.png (I got rid of the weather icons after taking the SS.)

When I left for the office this morning, I left it importing artwork for ~875 SNES titles. Hopefully that goes well, and I can do the other consoles tonight to finish up.

The entire thing is run by an Xbox360 controller, so you just need to plug it into the wall, run an HDMI cable to your TV, and you're good to go.

Cool stuff. Since you didn't use a SNES case, did you just stick with a MicroATX case or something?

Post pics and video when done plz plz k.

Yeah, I used this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811108396

It's a fair amount larger than an SNES, but it has a great look and will blend in nicely with a modern home theater.

It's basically the size of a 90's VCR.

The lack of sleep is catching up with me. I've been up until around 2AM every night with this damn thing. That's not an option tonight because the kids start school tomorrow. Thankfully, I don't punch a clock.

Nice idea, now thinking about doing something similar - But any reason not to grab something cheap like this:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...&Sku=T76-12001

(This thing is pretty ugly but it's two minutes of searching).

And throw in a cheap HDMI card:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...543&CatId=3669

Why just a console emu - No MAME or Visual Pinball? Or double duty as a media server?

Baby steps.

I actually couldn't find a useful MAME emulator that worked well with my front end. I will be adding MAME as soon as I can find a good option though.

As far as the media center goes, my family just doesn't really have any use for it. The kids watch cartoons and my wife is obsessed with the Investigation Discovery channel (If I ever stop posting on 2p2 for more than a month or two, she did it). I watch movies, but not in that room of the house, I already have a great little setup for watching DivX files in my bedroom. I will probably add some media features somewhere down the line, though. I added some video plugins like YouTube and Twitch.TV, but decided to disable them because they were a little TOO easy to use, and my boys are 10 and 13. (If you know what I mean.)

I found an EXCELLENT NeoGeo emulator, but development for it ended in like 1998 and there was absolutely no way to make it work without a mouse and incorporate it into my front end. It would have had to be a standalone program that I'd launch somehow. I.E. you wouldn't be able to pick your game from my game menu. If I feel ambitious, maybe I'll revisit that and come up with a workaround.

I bet I've sunk 60 hours into this thing in the past 6 days. It only took 30 minutes to build the actual system and get it running, the rest of that time was spent on the software side. The first 2 days were wasted trying to do it all with Ubuntu (**** Linux). Dozens of hours were spent on google just trying to figure all this **** out. Finding solutions for problems with something like this isn't like having an issue running D3 or Skyrim. People who do this are few and far between. The people who provide the solutions are usually HIGHLY technical geeks who are terrible at explaining said solutions in terms that average schmucks like me will immediately understand. Threads that might be pertinent to the problem I was having were usually from somewhere around 2006. I can't tell you how many times I'd find a "fix" for an issue only to have to google how to do the fix, only to find a 8 year old thread and have to google THAT fix. Eventually working backwards to my first problem. Then there were the times where I'd spend 6 hours on a solution, only to ultimately determine that it was a non-starter and have to begin all over again.

Knowing what I know now, I could probably compress those 60 hours into 5 or 6. Hopefully my thread will be clear enough that anybody who wants to do this will be able to without pulling their hair out.

With any luck, I'll have my write-up done by Friday afternoon and I'll post it then and answer any questions.

Also, just a small rant directed at the general internet population:

If you are troubleshooting an issue and you post on a forum in a thread that ultimately gets a decent amount of attention -- COME BACK AND TELL US WHAT YOU DID TO ****ING FIX IT!

JFC. Or WORSE are the people that come back to the thread and say, "nm fixed it!"

....

and that's it.


HOW, MOTHER****ER?!

For those of you interested in setting up your own arcade quality experience (i.e. by downloading MAME and ROMs), X-Arcade's "Tankstick" is on sale until Sun Nov 25 for $159 ($40 off), free shipping in the U.S.



It's definitely a cool toy and really enhanced my home arcade experience. Plus, there's two sticks so you can easily play gauntlet, street fighter etc with a friend. The trackball in the middle works great for Missile Command.

Super easy to use - just plug into two USB ports (one for the joysticks which maps to the keyboard, and the other for the trackball which maps to the mouse - no drivers needed!)

Only downside is that once you finish going through the nostalgia phase, you have a big white elephant device that will be sitting in the garage!

Not necessarily!

How many hours per month would you estimate?