specs

i_paq.jpg (12823 bytes)

The core of MAME GTX is ran by a Hewlett Packard 8860 1 Ghz CPU with 3D Now and 128MB RAM. It is completely stock as far as video cards, accelerators, ect. It plays almost all games at full frame rate except Street Fighter The Movie and a few others.

The monitor I used for my cabinet is a generic 17" EMC but I have to say I like it better than the one that came with the HP. I will put a real arcade monitor in soon, I'm looking for a 21" that is reasonable.

Update: The HP is gone, I have since bought a Comaq iPaq workstation computer to run the cabinet. This little micro-desktop has everything I need as far as ports go and the funny part is this computer performs better than the "faster" HP. It has a PIII 733Mhz and 512 Megs of RAM. I have never seen MAME run so smoothly before, with certain games I would see a "hiccup" with the sound and video. A perfect example is Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter (US). I am still trying to get it to hesitate like the 1 Gig HP. I put a massive heatsink and fan on the CPU since I have noticed that MAME starts to slow a bit after a while on any computer. This thing rocks.

My Opinion: Workstation computers are better for MAME since they are designed for performance instead of making birthday cards and playing Solitare. Mine is stripped bare of any software except for FMAME32 and the MAME files and folders and the latest ActiveX drivers. I also believe that a PIII processor is better any Celeron or Xeon. I heard those are Japanese made processors that they trow into these cheap family computers and try to pass it off as a "Pentium III".

There are two 8 way Happ Controls Competition joysticks, the same ones they use on the HotRod stick. I used 16 Happ Controls horizontal cherry microswitch buttons of varying colors. I modified a Digital Technologies trackball/mouse with 2 small Radio Shack temporary pushbuttons tapped in to the board for left and right click. Update: The trackball is now clear and there are constantly changing R/G/B LED's underneath. You get every color possible eventually since the LED's oscillators are randomly timed to slowly fade on and off.

Updated 10/4/2001 - Added a 4 way and a 2 way stick, plus pinball style buttons on the sides of the conrol panel.

Update: 4 way diagonal coming soon. My new idea for getting this to work without mounting it on my control panel will be shown soon. I am also adding analog pedals into the USB ports and the USB light gun is going to be here soon..

I hacked a Raider Pro Blue flight stick and converted it to a 2 button trigger stick with a 1.5 mm male/female headphone jack that makes it easy to remove off the control panel and out of the left joystick shaft holder. I also hacked a MS mouse and turned into a spinner with changeable knob/mini steering wheel. Mine is translucent blue like Tron's trigger stick.

Update: This guy now lights up Tron style when tyou plug it in and I also removed the rather loud clicky switches inside and replaced them with Happ Cherry switches.

The one and only keyboard encoder I would ever use, the I-PAC from Andy Warne. This encoder is so easy to set up and is pretty cheap. About $50 with shipping from the UK. The new J-PAC is programmable but also a pain according to most of the people who own one. The I-PAC is already programmed to MAME's defualt keyboard keys and works with the old keyboard port, ps/2, and USB. This thing has never once failed or missed a button bush. Excellent product.

I used a Digital technologies 3 button mouse for navigating WinME and also for trackball games. The ball that came with it was grey, I replaced it with a translucent blue ball and installed two lights inside to light up when the electronic key is inserted. The left and right clik buttons were hacked into the circuit board and placed on top of the control panel. The buttons are a pair of small temporary pushbuttons from Radio Shack.

The speakers are JBL 5 1/4" magnetically shielded coaxials running directly off the HP speaker ouputs. These things are loud when you want to crank the volume up on some of those NEO-GEO games. Update: I gutted the original left and right seperate amplifiers and went with a very small stereo amp gutted from some amplified PC speakers. Plus I put the circuit board / volume control right on the skirt under my control panel so now you can change volume, plug in headphones, and also turn the speakers on and off very easily.

The cabinet is cooled by a brushless 12V fan mounted on the back side of the base. It can move 30 cfm, so the monitor never gets hot. I highly suggest using a fan any time you close a monitor in a small space. Update: I also threw a huge fan / heatsink on the PIII on my new computer and it seems to run very well after being on for a day or two. That was $10.00 well spent.

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