Pictures
Here are some pictures of how the cabinet matured.
I started with a cabinet that had Twin Eagle running in it.
The monitor gave out, so I decided to gut it and fix it up for a Mame machine.
 Rough outer with no art. |
 Laptop installed and connected. |
|---|---|
 Up and running |
 Close up of the screen |
 Art Intalled |
 Bezel Detail |
 Marquee Lighted |
 Marquee |
 Bezel Bottom |
 Overlay art Installed |
 Control Panel Installed |
 Completed |
PDF art
Here is the art that I created in Illustrator.
I saved the art in PDF format and took it to FedEx/Kinko's to print.
They had a 24-hour turn around time frame.
Bezel | Marquee | Control Overlay
Parts
The Logitech Trackball can be used as a regular trackball to navigate within OS X
and as a trackball for the games (Centipede, Marble Madness, etc.)
To wire in the arcade controls to the laptop, I used an ipac board.
This has connections for up to 8 buttons of each player
and has a USB connector to your computer.
For the joysticks and buttons, you can get them pretty cheaply at Happ Controls.
The laptop is a TI Powerbook G4 DVI running at 667Mhz.
I bought it really cheaply on ebay for under $100.
The LCD was not included (broken), so it was just the bottom half.
I also have a set of powered computer speakers with a subwoofer.
Since I am using a apple laptop as the core, I am also using iTunes.
So, I have a juke box now also!!!!
Since the hard drive on the laptop is only 12Gig,
I have only moved over my top rated (most liked) songs.
There is a DVD drive in the laptop, so I can watch movies if want to.
My original plan was to put a projector in the top behind the marquee.
The Apple logo would be cut out for the projector lens.
But this turned out to be more of a change to the cabinet than I wanted.
Emulators
I have tried two different MAME emulators made for the Mac:
MacMame (v0.103u2) and Mame OS X (v0.124).
I find that MacMame, while older and no longer supported or updated,
seems to work better, especially the GUI.
MAME OS X requires OS X 10.4 while, MacMame will work in OS X 10.2.
ROMs
Here is a list of all 1,001 games that I have downloaded and tested to work with MacMame. Here is a link to download ALL of these ROMs (1.4 GB) with the screenshots in one zip file.