Ninteno Versus Mame Cabinet
[ History ][ Cabinet ][ Monitor ][ Controls ][ Software ][ Finish ][ Tutorials ]
    
7/18/04 - TKO Cabinet Picked up Today I went to Joe's place with my dad's pickup truck. We had earlier talked which cabinet I was going to purchase from him, and we decided on $225 for a working TKO cabinet is pretty good condition. Besides inverted colors, a kicked in coin door, and some scratches on the plastic, it was in great shape. When I got there, they had just gotten a new Star Wars standup cabinet, but unfortunately I had two of my friends accompanying me that were not extremely big into arcades, so I had to pack up the cab and save checking out the star wars cab for another day.
7/22/04 - Versus harness to Jamma Harness complete After a looong night of writing out which wire needs to go where, and finding the actual jamma layouts for all the different harnesses I had, the cabinet had been successfully converted from versus to jamma. I had the jamma harness from my first arcade machine, and it worked great besides a few corroded pins.
7/26/04 - 8/05/04 - Cabinet successfully primed and painted Sorry I don't have any pictures of the paint in progress, my parents left for a week so I took over the garage, but they also took the digital camera. Painting went pretty smoothly, I have never touched painting anything but on paper, so its not THAT hard. Of course I did both up the inside black a little bit because it peeled off where it got a lot of wear. I could have avoided this I'm sure by allowing it to dry longer, unfortunately I couldn't steal the garage for that long. Overall the final results were fine, although taping off the cabinet resulted in paint coming up when I took the tape off (ANNOYING!)
8/09/04 - Control Panel and Plexi Cut The control panel was finally cut, I had been pestering my dad to bust out the power tools for probably a week solid on this one. The plexi was a pain to cut because it kept breaking. The final pieces, although they work fine, were sort of jagged which by Saint's book indicated a bad snap. I might bring out some more sand paper and grind it all down, but until then the edge won't be that smooth.
8/10/04 - Two in One! T-molding AND vga cable hack finished Thats right! Not only did the t-molding come today, I also got the vga cable hack done successfully. As soon as the t-molding showed up on the front door, I took it out of its package, measured out exactly how much I needed, and got some kitchen scissors to cut it to the correct size along with notching the corners. Putting the t-molding into the cabinet would have been simple but I kind of overlapped the paint into the old t-molding slots and so I had to dremel down the space again. A wood hammer with a piece of cloth took care of jamming the t-molding into the cabinet, and besides one or two spots where the t-molding could have used some glue to hold it in, its turned out SPECTACULAR! The difference was astounishing, the cabinet looked pretty much complete besides the cp. The vga cable hack was done so my computer would boot plugged into the Jpac. The explanation to this is covered in the tutorials section.
8/14/04 - Control panel finished and controls in place The control panel was primed and painted (hey, I'm starting to get good at this!) and the plexi was placed on top with the controls all in place. Everything is looking good! The wiring isn't done yet, but that will not be a big problem. I have been tweaking with some of the software in the pc as well, everything works great except stupid RockNES. For some reason when it takes the argument to switch into 15hz, it crashes.
8/19/04 - Cabinet Finished and moved (well pretty much) After getting all the wiring done, and fixing a few kinks in the system (stupid corrodded jamma harness) the cabinet is fully running. Now that its done, it has to be moved from the garage into my closet. That took a good hour of moving by myself at 3 am the night before I moved back to school. I had to say my sad goodbyes to the Nintendo Versus Mame cabinet, but we will be reunited again when I come home on weekends! |
