Building a Mame Table top

typamc95 · Post by **typamc95** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:58 pm

Im gong to use a pretty decent computer for the job, and I might sell it

Monitor - 17 inch VGA

14" Tall with border
16" wide with border
17" Depth

Computer-256 Ram 120 GB HD Windows XP Home

8" tall
16" Wide
16" depth

I'm working on a diagram right now.

I want to have two Control boards with each having a 8 way joystick and eight buttons, and a 1st and 2nd player add coin button.

ganonbanned · Post by **ganonbanned** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:59 pm

now for the important part:

what games does it include?

typamc95 · Post by **typamc95** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:03 pm

all the classics I can find!
Pacman
Mrs.Pacman
All those star wars games
The VS. games if I can find them
Mario Bros
Tmnt games
Dig dug
Pole position
Neo turf master
Megaman power fighters/battles
Street fighters two
Impossible mission
And just what else i find on the way.

Opps...Ill remove that hateful comment from my sig, sorry....

Bibin · Post by **Bibin** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:40 pm

Don't combine vertical games with horizontal games. It looks aweful. Just run some good vertical classics with the -ror switch on mame, and rotate your monitor.

ganonbanned · Post by **ganonbanned** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:48 pm

typamc95 wrote:all the classics I can find!
Pacman
Mrs.Pacman
All those star wars games
The VS. games if I can find them
Mario Bros
Tmnt games
Dig dug
Pole position
Neo turf master
Megaman power fighters/battles
Street fighters two
Impossible mission
And just what else i find on the way.

Opps...Ill remove that hateful comment from my sig, sorry....

I dont even know what it said...

but get the simpons, its an amazing beat-em-up.

Bibin · Post by **Bibin** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 10:56 pm

Atari Cabinets (like the one used in Dig-Dug) > any cabinet

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:56 am

Well, that sounds good, my first arcade cabinet was a table top one, aka, a cocktail cabinet. I have some pics up on the web, you can visit my site at:

http://personal.stthomas.edu/arfink/projects.htm

Then just hunt around to find my pictures, etc.
I dont use it much anymore, on account of the fact that I am continually ticked off by MAME's crummy emulation of the real hardware, and the fact that I actually own real hardware to use instead.

Hope you like it, and good luck with your project!

Edit: Make sure your roms are legal. Support the industry, buy real arcade hardware today!

ATOMICMAN · Post by **ATOMICMAN** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:32 am

i always thought table top ones were small units made to be on a table (hence the name) more like an upright but without a stand for it and cocktails are actually full standing tables with the monitor facing upwards.

anyway. good luck.

Post by **Skyone** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:36 am

Guys, lets try to stay away from talking about ROMs much, eh?

Anyways, I have a cabinet in my garage, one old arcade style (has a JAMMA in it) and a small cocktail-like cabinet too (consists of one of those plug-in-play Pac-Man's

). They take time to make, but you gotta love 'em!

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 12:24 pm

Why are you putting in such a huge hard drive? Will this also be used for media? And why Windiws? If all the thing will do is play MAME games you're wasting resources.

All you really need is the AdvanceCD Live CD with some MAME games thrown on it. (All the games you listed put together will fit. You're not going to fill that hard drive with just MAME games.)

http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html

If you really want an OS on it, install 98 SE and use 98 Lite. Swap the shell, delete IE, do all that other good stuff and make the system load a lot faster. You can probably get away with even a 5 gig hard drive if you have one lying around. Beleive me, when you just want to play games, waiting for XP to boot sucks.

typamc95 · Post by **typamc95** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 5:50 pm

Do you have a 20 gb you could sell me?
In exchange, I can give you a dvd-rom drive.......
all my money is going to this project.

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:13 pm

I would agree with bicostp, you really don't want windows xp or anything like that. I personally prefer a nice clean DOS only setup, but that advanceCD thingy looks cool. The time you put into making a streamlined and minimized setup will be well worth it. I would suggest you look at a very nice frontend called ArcadeOS, which can work with almost any DOS program, even Quake! And, it does not need any extra buttons for coin in, exiting programs, or anything like that. It uses a button like the 1 player start button as a "shift" button, and then you push another button at the same time to select another macro. For example, on my machine I have 1p start+2p start setup to send the ESC function to the program, and I have 1p start+2p button1 to be pause, etc. It's cool.

Nucklez · Post by **Nucklez** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 11:02 pm

I've always called my small cabinet a Bartop cabinet. That is what I've usually seen the small ones called. I have a 17" monitor, 8 way stick, 8 player buttons and select and start buttons. Not enough room on it for another joystick with a 17" wide control panel. My brother and I are in the process of converting two upright cabinets into MAME cabinets. That will be my two player cabinet. We're currently mapping out the keyboard that we intended on hacking, but I'm just about ready to grab a GP-Wiz Keyboard encoder at this point. Our two player controls are two 8 way sticks with 6 player buttons each and the control panel is about 26.5" wide.