TOTAL Impulse MAME Cabinet
Prelude
The Idea
After deciding that I really, really needed my own MAME cabinet,
I started scrutinizing all the examples and ideas that I could
find. Taking inspiration from Lusid's
example, I decided that I should have a big cab (cabinet) with a
25 inch TV and enormous 4-player control panel with joysticks, tons
o' buttons, trackball, spinner, etc. With that in mind, I
actually started buying parts, controls, etc.
Facing the Facts
Then, I took a good, long look at a "real" video arcade
game cabinet with 25 inch monitor. Very big. Very
heavy. After serious thought, I down-scaled my plans to a
2-player cabinet with 19 inch display. I hoped to find an
actual (dead, gutted) arcade game cabinet to convert. However,
I had no good local leads on such a thing. Just as I was
starting to contemplate building a cab from scratch, Usenet
intervened…
Fate Smiles
One day at the end of June 2001, I spied a post… A local
pinball collector had made a bulk buy from an operator just to get a
certain pinball game. Now, he wanted to sell off the extra
stuff such as a jukebox, some bartop games, and several working and
non-working video arcade games. (Hi, Jim!) One phone
call and a short trip later, I was in his garage thinking about the
possibilities. Two hours later, I had agreed to buy a working
"Gal's Panic" game in a Taito JAMMA (Double Dragon)
cabinet (my first "real"
arcade game - read about it elsewhere) and a non-working
Solitaire Challenge game in a cabaret-style cabinet - my future MAME
cabinet.
After bribing a truck-owning coworker into helping transport them
back to my place, I soon had two video arcade game cabinets sitting
in my kitchen (where they'd stay for a couple weeks).
Dynamo Solitaire Challenge [KLOV
entry]
 This
is a slightly odd game. The cabinet is pretty much full-width
and full-depth but qualifies as a cabaret because of its shorter
height. Most notably, it lacks the typical large lighted
marquee sign on top. I bought it non-working and never even
tried to turn it on (since I was going to gut it anyway).
What did I get for my money?
- Tatung 14" VGA monitor (still untested)
- Happ over/under coin door lacking a coin mechanism and with a
big hole where the bill validator had been removed
- Control panel with a Happ 2.25 inch trackball, two 4 inch
speakers and a couple buttons
- Game boards & wiring. This is a PC-based game.
It runs off a baby AT motherboard powered by an AMD 386SX/40
processor with standard video and sound cards. The game
logic is on a PROM-filled expansion card, and there's a special
interface card for the coin controls (or something). The
trackball ran through a special interface board and then into a
standard serial interface. (If anyone is interested in
buying any of these parts, let me know.)
The wood was pretty solid and intact. However, the cab had
evidently been exposed to some moisture. The black covering
was bubbling and peeling around the edges.
There is only one thing that I still can't figure out. Who
the heck would want to pay money to play solitaire?
Photos of an intact and working Solitaire
Challenge machine.
Go on to the Cabinet
Refurbishment |
