Hello you lot. you might have to bear with me :)

[JackNco]

Hello all
I have joined here because I have decided to build a Mame arcade box with a friend. at the moment I'm just sorting out the software side of things :P

I am planning on building a 2 player cabinet with Mame and Mala as the front end.

I have some experience with Mame32 a few years ago but right now im just sorting out bugs and getting things sorted.

I spend a lot of time on another forum so I know the general etiquette about searching before you ask and playing nice with other.

I Hope once I have learned the basics I can start helping others.

All the best, hope to chat to you all soon

John

[Epsi]

I spend a lot of time on another forum so I know the general etiquette about searching before you ask and playing nice with other.


... If only all people knew about that.

If your into arcades, we'll be seeing alot of each other, since thats all I know about around here....

Welcome to EZ

[FatTrucker]

Hi welcome to the boards.

I've made several mame cabs over the last couple of years so if you get stuck or need any advice on the software, hardware or Front-end side of things feel free to drop me a pm.

[JackNco]

hello to both of you.

Im sure I will have lots of questions, the main things i need to research at the moment are the ipac and getting XP to boot in to Mala directly. Cant be that hard (but then again thats what I always say)

Chat to you soon

John

[FatTrucker]

The Ipac is really easy to set up. You simply wire your buttons to the screw terminals and plug the USb connector into the PC. The PC sees it as a USB keyboard so it works with pretty much anything.

In terms of booting directly to Mala (I use Mamewah). The easiest route is to stick a shortcut to the Mala .exe into the Windows Startup folder and it will boot automatically after XP loads. You can then use something like TweakUI or another program that allows you to modify the Windows startup and shutdown screens to change the windows boot screens to something with a Mame flavour. Clear all icons from the desktop and set the background colour to black and you need never really show the machine is booting to windows.

The other alternative is to set your Front-end as the windows shell, which is a lot more work with XP (nice and easy with Win98 though) but there are a few apps out there that allow you to do it.

There's a vid here of my first Mame Cab booting and shutting down using the Startup folder method to give you an idea.
Right Click and Save as, file is about 40Mb. FatTruckers Mame Cab. (http://www.bleat.org.uk/mamecab/100_0020.mov)

[JackNco]

thanks for that. sorry it takes me a while to reply. I havent started the project yet and so im only checking things every few day.

Good to know this place is a friendly forum.

Chat to you soon

John

[FatTrucker]

No worries.

Some helpful sites, you may or may not have already come across.

BYOAC (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/) The home of DIY Mame cabs.

Ultimarc (http://www.ultimarc.com/) UK based parts company. Home of the Ipac, Jpac and ArcadeVGA, Excellent prices, very good quality and customer support is good.

Happ Controls (http://www.happcontrols.com/) Every piece of arcade hardware you could ever possibly need - pricey though.

Project Arcade (http://www.projectarcade.com/toc.html). An excellent read and a handy reference tool if you are doing your first (or fifth) build. Includes templates for several types of cab and most types of controls, along with interesting articles on virtually every type of control, how to interface it with a PC and where to get it. Also covers setting up front-ends and all the other whistles and bells that make a great cab.

You can still get it from most bookshops including Amazon.

[JackNco]

hey cheers, ill check em out.

John