Ripplin River Tech

Update, forgot to post that the glass is in and I am happily playing this machine, seems like a couple of times a week at least

See updates here

http://ripplinriver.com/?p=67

Hey, it’s cold out (down to -18F) and I figured I should stay in and post the results of my cocktail arcade project.

I am pretty much done with this my first arcade project, just need to add the glass, add a bump button for pinball and tweak the user interface. I worked on this in Dec 2007 and posted most of my progress in a blog. It’s such a fun project and I could not have done it without the posts of countless others…so, if I find people are interested, I’ll be glad to post even more details.

Here is a photo of the nearly finished product.

I started this blog with the following entry…you should be able to follow the whole progress by looking at these blog comments

Thanks

Rip

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I’ve wanted to set up a mame arcade machine for quite some time. Not sure what mame is? Here are some examples. I plan to build a cocktail arcade since it will fit my game room better than a standup arcade.

Recently my wife’s Thinkpad display stopped working, so I guess now is as good a time as any. The laptop has a VGA display port, so I can easily hook up a cheap 19″ monitor and fit both of them in the small space offered by a cocktail cabinet. The Thinkpad is a T20, 550mhz PIII, but it should be good enough to play the old school games I’m after (Pacman, Defender, Joust, 1941, Galaga, StreetFighter, etc)

The plans I’m using include Kyle Lindstrom’s Pacman Cocktail Table and Instructions. I’d like to play some games that won’t work cocktail style, so I may add a third set of controls to one side of the box.
I got a gift certificate for Barnes and Noble and bought the book Project Arcade This book has detailed plans for an upright arcade but no plans for a cocktail table. The book is somewhat dated, but still has lots of good details on how things work, pictures and reviews of many arcade parts and links to good mame resources.

I’ll use a keyboard encoder to hook up the buttons and joysticks. I’ve heard horror stories of using a keyboard hack or gamepad hack. So the only question is which encoder to use. After reading the book and surfing a bit, I decided to use a GPWiz Eco 32 from groovygamegear.com (remember this is for a Thinkpad, so I plan to use USB instead of PS2 style keyboard interface)

I’m watching the Revision3 Systm team as they build an arcade this month.

Another stroke of luck, a friend donated a pile of buttons and two XGaming joysticks. Since the buttons are a mixture of colors and the joysticks cannot easily be switched between 4 and 8 way, I may end up using different hardware, but this gear at least allows me to test out a keyboard layout.

I’m not sure, but I assume I want a joystick that switches between 4 and 8 way. This includes the Omni-Stik Prodigy Arcade Joystick and the Ultimarc Mag Stick. (I ended up using the MagStik Plus), Buttons will be by Happ Controls with Cherry switchs

For software, we’ll see what I end up with, but right now with Windows 2000 on my pc I’ll be able to play some retro games like Atari Classics and Descent…maybe even Duke Nukem (hmm, I will have to switch the joysticks to the side, or learn how to rotate the screen for that). I have installed Mame32 Mamewah. Mame32 works, but I don’t see how to use it without a keyboard and mouse. It looks too much like a pc application. Mamewah looks great, but music and graphics problems result when I run it. (I ended up using GameLauncher)

Today I avoided the Black Friday rush (though I did do some online shopping and built a mockup of an arcade keyboard layout. I used a piece of an old table tennis table (it gets to play games again! ).

Since I own a Street Fighter Jamma board, I will play Street Fighter for sure and I think this game requires the most buttons of any game I plan to play. Therefore I plan to use six buttons as shown, or perhaps with bottom three offset from top three. The extra three vertical buttons will be located elsewhere on the machine (tbd)

Want to see the keyboard layout for your favorite machine? Many can be found on Killer List of Video Games

See these blog comments for more details…