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Old arcade cab + PC = best thing ever


FireSlash
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So last week I picked up an old Fighter's History cab for $100. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but thing wrong with it is lazy wiring (and missing side art)

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However, the game itself is awful. It's basically a SF clone, and an awful one at that.

So, add an old computer, some emulators, Hyperspin, and a lot of creative wiring to produce: EMULATOR CABINET.

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I just finished it up last night so I only got the Genesis emulator set up before it got a bit late.... But you've not played Genesis games until you've played them on an arcade cabinet. It's a magical experience.

So on to the nitty gritty details:

I replaced the game board with some misc PC parts I had sitting around, threw windows XP on, and installed Hyperspin to make things a bit easier to navigate.

The video card is an arcadeVGA from Ultimarc (Basically a modified Radeon HD 2600 that supports arcade monitor resolutions and refresh rates natively). Input is handled via a J-Pac, and sound is through the original cabinet speakers, amplified with the amp from a Genius SW-V2.1 1250 computer speaker system

The setup was pretty easy to wire really, the hardest part is with the software setup and fixing all of the awful wiring in the cab.

Overall cost: ~$300 total.

Totally worth it.

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Sweet. Are you going to try to do some kind of custom cabinet art or just leave it as-is?

I'm waffling between getting a large adhesive print done or letting one of my art friends having her way with it. Right now I'm more worried about getting all the software set up and the hardware mounted somewhat securely. At the moment only the Genesis emu works properly.

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If your gonna use Mame i suggest version 1.33 and RomNation.net and emuparadise for the rom's seeing as those seem to work best on that version strangely. (mainly romNation)

Normally i wouldn't suggest the sites

But seeing as mame is rather fickle with what rom's it allows theres not much else i could do if i want to help put you in the right direction.

I tried the newer version and it didnt recognize most of the roms i had so i downgraded again.

Must admit right now i've been testing out Hyperspin and it keeps freezing on me for some reason, not sure why but i'm working on figuring it out.

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I find it strange you'd use a Genesis emulator to play Arcade games in your Arcade Cabinet, compared to the vastly superior arcade originals

Other than that AWESOME

I was having problems with the rom set I was using not lining up with MAME. As above mentioned, MAME is very annoyingly fickle about rom vs mame versions.

Also I've not had any issues with HyperSpin crashing or hanging, but it's fairly intensive so you might want to check your video card and cooling and etc. I'm using the latest arcadeVGA (ATI HD2600 I think) for reference, but I was using an 8600GT before that and neither had problems.

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