Retro Arcade
From WFFwiki
Well it all started in September of 2007 when a buddy of mine (Emil Schönning) asked me if I'd be interested in an arcade video cabinet, to which the answer was (an obvious) hell yes! The timing was also perfect since I had a weeks vacation this week.
Anyway, 5 days later and it's finally ready for some retro-gaming action, After Burner II, Bubble Bobble, Pacman, you name it.
Here are some pictures of the cabinet and some explanation of what I did to it...
An Intel Celeron 2.8Ghz PC, which is the heart of the arcade system. This is before I put it into a 'modified' case.
The machine arrives and all doors are open, it's a bit dirty but in basically good shape.
A back view of the machine. You can see the MTC900E arcade monitor which is capable of a whopping 320x240ish resolution. On the plus side it is exactly what was used for the games. You can also see the JAMMA harness (if you know what you are looking for ;)
The underside of the control system
The JAMMA2PC card mounted against the back on the money box with the JAMMA harness inserted (this converts the joysticks and buttons into keypresses so that the computer can understand them), it also helps protect the monitor against highsync rates (which can destroy these old monitors if you are not careful).
There were some fairly dangerous electronics (exposed mains cables, etc.). I mounted the exposed connectors in a box and then put a surge-protected 4 way mains gang inside the cabinet.
Here you can see the PC hooked up to the cabinet. At this stage only the controls were working.
In order to fit the PC inside the cabinet and also leave room for a subwoofer I needed to heavily modify a case (basically I cut it in half so I only had the part that held the PSU and the mother-board, then I mounted the harddrive on the side of the cabinet). You can also see the hole I cut in the bottom which is the PC's power control. This is so the kids can start the system without removing the back of the cabinet ('cause monitors can be deadly and this one has no case)
Using a special ArcadeVGA video card the cab is connected and Ubuntu Linux boots! (You didn't think I would use Microsoft, that would be far to easy!)
By now the hallway of our house looks like wife-hell/geek heaven...
After about a day of configuration Xwindows fires up. Ubuntu on very very old monitor ;)
Bubble Bobble II is loaded and the girls run towards the light of arcade heaven!
As a final touch I constructed a light for the marquee (the panel at the top of the machine) and added a 120mm fan into the back door, the heat was building up in the cabinet and affecting the monitor. Yes that is Super Mario Brother on the screen... So much fun, so little time!
