MAME Cocktail Table project

[myminirocks]

Hey All,

So I saw one of those old school cocktail arcade tables at the pub the other day, seriously cool retro.

So I got to thinking, how cool would it be to have one of these in the games room, but, seems that people are already onto the revival and to buy one of these babies is crazy expensive!

OK, I'll just build one then me thinks.

SO, this is all very Step 1, or 'beta' i guess, but I need to get my head around how to get MAME games, roms etc running on OSX, being of course the heart of this little baby will be a soon to be retired MacMini.

I have downloaded MAMEOSX, I have installed a few old roms I had but none of them play. Pretty much all of them say some files are missing, clearly I am missing something.

Anyone have any experience in this and can get me going in the right direction?

The finished product I am hoping will house my back up hard drives and an airport express with some seriously good speakers so it will also be a jukebox/airtunes speaker, web browser etc etc. I am probably dreaming but step one is to work out how i will run games on it.

cheers!
_________________
Intel 2.4Ghz/4G Ram/1TB HDD/Server MacMini
WD MyBook Studio II 2 TB External
3.06GHz/4G Ram/500G HDD/SuperDrive iMac
Elgato EyeTV Diversity
16G iPhone 3G

[macmanmacman]

I am currently working on such a project i found a old pacman cocktail table that the mainboard was completly toast on.

Found out the board was going to cost me 700.00.

WOW!!!!

That's a lot what a rip-off.

So i went to a local recycle store and purchased a pentium 4 2.00 ghz computer and decided to place the board inside the cocktail table and use mame to run pacman.


Issue's in doing this.

First issue is that mame need's two parts not just the emulator and the rom but a virtual cloned hard disk image of the original game bad new's these are considered copyrighted and cannot be downloaded by legal means.

So i looked into other emulators.

There is a way to do a cocktail table using any emulator.

But you need a graphics card that supports screen rotation.

And you need to program the screen to auto rotate when switching players.

All of this leads to hours of programing.

But don't give up.

I have seen several people do these mods and they work great when finished.

[myminirocks]

Wow! Hmmm ok, that is going to be a little bit over my head.

Oh well, the CFO was probably never going to approve it anyway!

Would be interested to hear your progress though!
_________________
Intel 2.4Ghz/4G Ram/1TB HDD/Server MacMini
WD MyBook Studio II 2 TB External
3.06GHz/4G Ram/500G HDD/SuperDrive iMac
Elgato EyeTV Diversity
16G iPhone 3G

[macmanmacman]

Well my progress has been slow i am still trying to find a monitor to use for this mod.

It has been slow going but here is what i have so far.

1. installed pentium 4 mainboard processor heatsink hard drive memory.

2. purchased 2 rockband dead drumsets the controller board is what i wanted out of these because they are compatible with both the mac os x 360 driver and the winblows driver as well.

3. installed new controllers old ones where pretty rusted and couldn't be salvaged.

4. cleaned glass.

5. working on new mural for the top under the glass.

6. Wired up usb 2.0 hub to run low level leds to light up the glass by the controllers

7. Wired the coin tray to the power switch for the computer just insert a quarter and the computer starts up.

8. installed server power supply 800 watts of power going to need it to power up fans and additional components.

9. installed external USB Ports for CD-drive needed to install windows or linux or OSX86 haven't decided yet on which.

And thats about it.

It is becoming a franken computer really fast.

But so far i am having fun.

[emax4]

I wouldn't put in a coin door unless it's there just for looks. With MAME you're not supposed to be charging anyone to play the games that aren't yours.

[macmanmacman]

it's not to charge anyone!!!!!

I wanted a unique power button to power on the computer so i built a coin tray at the base that returns the Quarter to the person playing it is only designed to power on the computer not to turn it off because windows xp has a auto shutdown feature that will shut the computer down.

[noomi]

SO, this is all very Step 1, or 'beta' i guess, but I need to get my head around how to get MAME games, roms etc running on OSX, being of course the heart of this little baby will be a soon to be retired MacMini.

I have downloaded MAMEOSX, I have installed a few old roms I had but none of them play. Pretty much all of them say some files are missing, clearly I am missing something.

Anyone have any experience in this and can get me going in the right direction?
_________________
noomi

[macmanmacman]

yea you need the games disk image which i cannot link you to there illegal to download thats why you have to go to bit torrent