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Purchase of cabinet and parts ordered
December 2002
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Here we have the 4-player cabinet as I received it. It had an Alien Vs Predator board in it at the time but has obviously seen some NBA Jam at one time or another. Needless to say I have since stripped off the stickers, removed the door padlock and cleaned up the exterior a little.
Over the next few weeks I did a lot of research on what I needed to get the system working. Luckily (as it saved me a lot of effort), a guy called Andy at Ultimarc was working on a video card for the PC that supports the 15kHz scan frequency of arcade monitors. This saved me the hassle of locating a card to suit this frequency and having to run a DOS environment. |
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Here's some stuff to know about arcade monitors:
Mine, and I'm sure this pertains to most of them, is built for American
power standards. That is, it requires 110V or so to run. Now, I bought a whole
working cabinet and so I got a step-down transformer thrown in. If you
come to make a MAME cabinet yourself, make sure you check the power
requirements on the monitor.
There's nothing too technical about step-down transformers. Here's a
picture of mine. You can see there is an input and output side. Basically
I have 240V coming in one side (after passing through some filtering gear
to make sure the power is nice and clean) and 2 sockets on the output side
that are configured to accept American style power plugs and feed
105V-110V. One is used for the monitor and I have a backup plug in case I
buy some other American appliance I want to plug in there.
You can see my grey input wires coming in on the left and the blue outputs
on the right. There are also a couple of green wires on the left that are
the ground/earth lines from my household 240V supply. These are screwed
down onto one of the mounting feet on the transformer. Hopefully this
means that any current leakage or short into the casing of the transformer
will go to ground and trip the circuit breakers in my house, rather than
kill someone.
The green and grey wires on the right (with the black cable tie holding
them together) are the power and earth for the marquee fluorescent light.
240V comes into the cabinet and is split to both the step-down transformer
and a special power block for the light. Power is simply run from the
block up to the light. All this stuff is pretty much how it appeared in
the original cabinet except I've taken it all out of the steel container
it was mounted in. |
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