BlogChuck » MAME

Mame Cabinet 2.0

Ok. So a lot has happened in the past few weeks. The cabinet is coming along nicely. I had an old AMD PC I gutted and mounted inside the cabinet. I stripped the outer red formica off of the sides and painted it black. I replaced the rubber molding on the cabinet. I stripped down an old 19″ CRT I had laying around and I am using that for the monitor. I connected a J-PAC card to the existing jamma harness that came with the cabinet. I wired the built in speakers to the J-PAC card and ran it through the sound card on the motherboard. I replaced all of the joysticks and buttons. I replaced the locks on the back access door and the coin doors.

In order to get the games up and running, I loaded the hard drive with Ubuntu 8. It works nicely. The most difficult part has been finding and easy to configure front end that prevents the desktop windows from showing (to keep it looking as close to arcade quality as possible). Currently, I am running gxmame as the front end. It’s not very pretty, but it works.

To get it up and running, I ran the following commands:

wget http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gxmame/gxmame_0.35beta2-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i gxmame_0.35beta2-1_i386.deb
sudo chmod 0777 /usr/share/games/xmame/roms/

- put any/all ROMs in the above location

Problem with changing to different workspace in middle of game play:
sudo vi /usr/share/gconf/defaults/10_

metacity-common
- change the number of workspaces to 1

sudo vi /usr/share/gconf/defaults/10_metacity-common
/apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces 1

- Then I had to change the minimize all windows (CTRL+ALT+D) Since when player 2 pushes left on the joystick and player one pushes both button 1 and button 2 all at the same time, that equates to CTRL+ALT+D
- This can be edited in “SYSTEM->PREFERENCES->WINDOW SHORTCUTS”. I just changed it to the Windows key.

So now I have MAME running. But then I wanted the machine to boot up without requiring input. I also wanted it to start the gxmame frontend so as soon as the machine was turned on, you could select the game of your choice.

To autologin:

System->Administration->Login Window and set the autologin for the user set to run MAME on the cabinet.

To load gxmame automatically:

System->Preferences->Sessions and I added gxmame

Now when the arcade is turned on, it automatically loads into the mame frontend and you are ready to start playing.

I am still waiting for the artwork I purchased to come in the mail. I am getting a new Marquee and controller panel artwork. Once everything is complete, I will upload the picture and give my final thoughts.