Here is a short update on our arcade hobby project. We thought we were pretty much done with it when we pulled out the television tube and hardware and mounted that in the cabinet. But things worked out differently. We spent days (and then some more days) trying to get the tv working but to no avail. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the sync signals timed right for it. Using a modulator and a tv card we only got black and white. So in the end we had to conclude that the tv was broken (or that we broke it by remounting it in the cabinat, we didn’t test before hand whether it worked……).

Anyway, we found a new tv in the tv repair and second hand tv shop downstairs in our office building, tested that before taking it out of its shell and mounting it in the cabinet. This time, everything worked out nicely. We tried to get a picture and hooray it worked! So we planned for a friday evening of tinkering with the arcade under the enjoyment of a couple of beers (ps: funny how much friends you have when you take a case of beer on your morning commute).
We then had the luminous idea to do a transplant of the motherboard too, we were using an old celeron 450Mhz board, but running outrun in xmame proved to be a bit too much for that so we decided to replace that with a 1Ghz celeron. Of course, that was not without problems. For example, the old board had ISA and we had an ISA sound- and joystick card. The new board only had PCI. So after mobilizing a girlfriend to bring us a new PCI sound card, and determining the proper order of PCI cards, we finally could play! The first game was bubble bobble, one of the old arcade classics in its C64 version.

So, now what is left is the finishing touch: mount the pc inside the cabinet, work on the paint and construction of the cabinet itself, write a frontend to choose games from xmame (the multi arcade machine emulator) or xmess (the emulator for sega, nintendo, commodore, msx and other systems), and get stereo sound (due to one amp getting very hot we decided to go for mono for the moment).

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 10:38 and is filed under English, Science 'n stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.