The Ingredients - the encoder

As I'm a newbie to Arcade cabinet building, I chose a keyboard encoder that I thought would be the easiest to fit and best supported by MAME and MALA.

For this reason I saw the I-PAC2 as the only choice. According to the blurb it is "the world's most advanced PC interface for buttons and joysticks". I sourced this in the UK from Arcade World UK:

http://www.arcadeworlduk.com/products/I-PAC-2-FS32-Keyboard-Encoder.html

The I-PAC2 supports enough buttons for my cabinet:

As you may be able to make out from the labelling on the PCB, the I-PAC2 has support for:

• Player 1 Up, Down, Left and Right (joystick)
• Player 2 Up, Down, Left and Right (joystick)
• Player 1 Start
• Player 2 Start
• Player 1 Coin
• Player 2 Coin
• Player 1 SW1-SW8
• Player 2 SW1-SW8
• Player 1 A/B
• Player 2 A/B

As well as the Start and Coin buttons, I will have six buttons for each player on the front of my cabinet and one side paddle button for each player. I also intend to have several "control" buttons that I will use as a means to navigate MALA and MAME e.g. Tab, Escape, Enter, Shift etc.

The controller that I bought included the board above, a full set of pre-crimped cables (i.e. one end is crimped ready for fixing onto the buttons) and a PS2 to USB cable for connecting the encoder to the PC. It also came with little L-shaped stand-offs that can be screwed into the cabinet base so that the PCB can be securely mounted.

As for the configuration, it appears that the MALA front end has direct support for the I-PAC2 encoder. I haven't tried this yet but I will post again once I have.

The Ingredients - the power

Just a short posting to describe what I intend to do for power in my arcade cabinet. The arcade cabinet will contain:

• PC powered by an ATX power supply.
• 19" monitor
• Speakers
• Strip light for arcade cabinet marquee.

The ideal would be that there would be one button to turn the arcade cabinet on and off, remembering that the PC needs to be shutdown properly. So to do all this I found the Tricklestar PowerStrip on eBay.

This power strip has 1 control socket, 3 switched sockets and an always-on socket. The idea is that I will plug the PC into the the control socket and the speakers, monitor and strip light into the switched sockets.

The PC power switch will be moved onto the control panel of the arcade cabinet. When pressed the PC will either power on or be configred to shut down. When the PC is turned on, the power strip detects that the control socket is drawing current and it turns the switched sockets on. Similarly, when  the PC is shutdown, it stops drawing (that much) current. Again the power strip detects this and turns off the switched sockets. This particular power strip has a variable control where you can set the cut-off point.

Just one minor issue I've noticed. When you initially turn on the power strip, maybe becasue the PC power spikes or something, but the switched sockets briefly turn on and off again. This is not a huge problem as I imagine that the arcade cabinet (and therefore the power strip) will be switched on normally and the arcade cabinet will be turned on and off via the power switch on the control panel.

The Ingredients - the display

I started this project by selecting the bartop arcade cabinet first. That pretty much limits the size of the display that I can use in my cabinet. I have seen lots on the internet about whether to use a CRT or LCD monitor.

This bartop arcade cabinet is really quite tight for space so really the only choice is LCD. As I have no preference for MAME horizontal or vertical games I wanted a fairly squarish monitor. Above 19" monitors there don't appear to be that many non-widescreen monitors. However there were a few 4:3 or 5:4 19" monitors kicking around.

The first monitor I found was the Xerox XA7191 19" monitor. This was a beautiful monitor with an elegant glass front.

Unfortunately, when I went to collect this second hand monitor it failed to power-on. I took it off the sellers hands anyway in the hope that it would be something simple that was wrong with it. Not to be.

The next monitor that I found was the Dell 1905FP monitor. This is a 5:4 monitor with a resolution of 1280 x 1024. Once again, I sourced it from eBay.

This monitor is fit for purpose. It disassembles easily i.e. the black plastic bezel and casing can easily be removed, leaving a flat square-edged aluminium-boxed monitor. It can be VESA mounted and that's what I intend to use when fitting it in my arcade cabinet. The display is pretty good too.

The Ingredients - the computer

When I first looked at building a MAME cabinet, one of the first things I did was to download MAME onto my old laptop to try it out. And when I say old, I mean old. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 640m. This laptop has been upgraded by me to have 4GB memory, Windows 7 64 bit and a 120GB SSD so it performs reasonably well as a family computer. However, running MAME - not so good.

To be fair it was nearly good enough. I viewed the frame rate when playing some standard MAME games and it was almost 100%. In some cases there was some graphic jitter and in others there were some audio anomalies. The laptop has an Intel Core Duo T2300.

I then decided to try MAME on my dev machine. This is a HP Pavilion 6630UK. This has 8 GB memory, Windows 7 64 bit and a AMD X4 635 CPU. This CPU computer had no problems with any of the same MAME games.

I now had an upper and lower spec to try and find the computer to fit into my MAME cabintet. This is where the website, PassMark's CPU Benchmark, is your friend. Becasue of my understanding of the way that MAME works (AFAIK), I used the "Single Thread Performance" benchmark. In that list, my computers CPUs were as follows:

Intel Core Duo T2300 @ 1.66GHz - 521

AMD Athlon II X4 635 @ 2.9GHz - 988

So, something in between (or even better) would be good. I figured that something with a small form factor would do the trick in my size-limited bartop arcade cabinet. However, finding a second hand SFF PC was easier said than done. If you have one of these lying about I recommend that you stick it on eBay - they sell well!

I eventually plumped for a Dell Optiplex 780 PC. This had an Intel Core2 Due E8400 @ 3GHz, 4GB ram, onboard GMA4500 graphics  and Windows 7 64 bit. This has a "Single Thread Performance" benchmark rating of 1256. Job done. Again, eBay was the source:

When the PC arrived, like a lot of refurbished PCs, it had the bare OS installed and not much else. This is ideal as anybody who has ever had a new PC knows, it starts getting slower and slower to start up as more and more software is installed.

From power-on to starting MALA, this Windows 7 64 bit machine takes under 30s, even without an SSD. I did cut out as much as I could from the BIOS ("fast start" enabled) and Windows (no animation and no unnecessary services. When running MAME this PC had more than enough grunt to run anything that I intended to play.

As for installing the PC in my cabinet, I need to strip it down. From what I can see the Dell Optiplex 780 has pros and cons for this. Pros:

• Mmmm.
• It's green coloured?

Cons:

• PSU ATX power cable is incredibly short, limiting where it can be sited in my cabinet.
• The front panel IO board, containing the 2xUSB, mic, audio, temperature sensor and power switch is connected to the motherboard via an undocumented 40 pin header and cannot be removed (otherwise the PC won't start).
• The shroud/duct for the CPU heatsink fan is like the opening of the Channel Tunnel - it's massive.

After spending an entire evening trying to figure which pins to use to hive off the motherboard power switch to an external switch of my own, I gave up. Dell had beat me. I took the front panel out and soldered two fly leads to my new power switch on the underside of the existing IO panel power switch. See below:

Job done (for now). I'll need to site the motherboard in the cabinet next.

The Ingredients - the cabinet

I don't exactly remember the point when I decided that I was going to build an arcade cabinet but I can remember the first "ingredient" that I found that got me really enthused about the whole thing. It was a pre-cut, pre-drilled mdf flat pack that I found on ebay.co.uk from this chap:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/richsbartoparcades

The actual cabinet I got in the end was one like the following listing:

I have the tools to make this myself, but I figured that I would save myself a lot of effort and at that price, I wouldn't be saving myself much money doing it myself.

I went for a bartop-sized cabinet for two reasons. Firstly, it was a lot cheaper than the full height version or even a used cabinet (and I was only meant to be spending my birthday money). Secondly, I'd have more chance convincing "the boss" that we could fit a bartop cabinet in our house rather than anything bigger.

I went for a 2 player version as I have two kids and I didn't want to be the source of any more "it's my turn, no it's my turn"-type arguments. I did a bit of investigation beforehand to find out that this cabinet would easily fit a 19" square(-ish) monitor e.g. 4:3 or 5:4.

A few days after ordering, the flat pack arrived in fine condition. This particular flat pack is a two player cabinet that can accommodate 2 joysticks and 6 buttons for each player. The 28mm holes for the buttons and joysticks have been very neatly pre-drilled. As the seller described, it came with no fixings, which does allow for some flexibility in the construction.