The
MAME Game
I looked into the kebab shop today and I looked
in today, to the kebab shop, yeah yeah... and… where was
I? Oh yes, the kebab shop. And I saw that the Gun Smoke arcade
cabinet had GONE!!!
Oh, how I coveted this cabinet. It was nothing
fancy, but, like many of us, I had nursed a mawkish dream to have
my own arcade machine. And as it's not the kind of thing you can
just pick up off the shelf from Bourgeois Electricals, it had
been put off – for metallic reasons (I draw my metaphor
from coins). Well, scrap that dung: mine ended up costing about
a florin.
I happened to know the name of the local entertainment
peddler who'd supplied this cabinet so, as is my way, I gave him
a shout to ask what had happened. He's Welsh, and sounded like
a mix of Helen from Big Brother, Ruth Madoc from Hi-De-Hi, and
the woman that says: "The Piccadilly Line" on the Central
Line tubes. He said it was still available – for the price
of £70. I said I'd be straight over…
At last – he is mine. I
shall call him… Marquee Smith.
My mum's face was certainly an Athena moment
when I told her where I was going, but fuck it. If she complained,
I'd just have to sack her for not being loyal. So up I went, clothed,
with my £70 note.
Actually, when I had a look at the cab I was
a bit disappointed. It was hardly optically perfect - the joystick
was shot, the monitor had the most splendid burn-in, and there
was a gaudy, yellowed trim around the edge of the cab. So I tutted,
flashed him a baleful glare and offered £50. He bought it
– hook, line, sinker and the extended 5-year warranty with
on-site maintenance with ‘Easy-Pay’ monthly instalments…
nothing to pay until September 1989. He even rooted around his
garage for some spare bits – just to get rid, I think. So
I ended up bagging the cab, a couple of joysticks (worth about
£10 each) and a lift home in his car, replete with arcade
machine.
He even helped me into the house with it, bless
him. We whispered our tender goodbyes, I shoved the cab into the
kitchen, fired up and inserted a coin. Hello, Mister! I was delighted.
I finally had my own cab!
Phwooar. Look at that –
she’s spread wide. All for you.
After a night of faffing about hopelessly with
Gun Smoke, I decided that I had to go for it - rip the guts out,
and have a crack at making my own MAME-station. I had a really
good think about what would make the cab most authentic, and I
decided that the imperative thing was to have a perfect screen.
You know all too well that running MAME on a PC monitor looks
nothing like the game did in the arcades – and that’s
enough to utterly crumble the experience for many. Can I use the
existing screen in the cab? Can I fuck. The screen burn wasn’t
ignorable, plus the screen was mounted vertically, and I wanted
to play mostly horizontally oriented games.
So I had to source a proper arcade monitor,
or find a display that might give me the same picture, and the
following statement is probably the most interesting piece of
information you will ever read: an old RGB monitor or television
set works in exactly the same way as an arcade monitor. As it
happened, I had an old Philips CM-8833 kicking around on my bedroom
floor…
Thing is, yeah, is that you can’t just
plug a VGA signal into the back of this and expect it to work.
You could be chunky and plug a graphics-card TV-out (if it has
one) into the video input – but you will actually drown.
You see, this wasn’t done this way back in the day. Rather
than relying on one little cable to supply the colour and synchronisation
information to the monitor, the circuit boards in most standard
arcade machines have three separate wires for the red, green and
blue – and one or two for the sync signal. And you already
know this, because I just told you.
Boot…
If you’re looking to pull together a
cab and don’t find the picture a PC monitor gives you is
a problem, then just go ahead and fucking ignore me - I’ll
just writhe. But if you do find PC monitors a load of Papworth
General for this kind of bunkum, then I’ll pass this black
art onto you: go to www.ultimarc.com
and just buy up an ArcadeVGA card. Yep, yep – this outputs
the kind of horizontal and vertical frequencies the ol’
CM-8833 is coherent with and laps up on a daily basis. ‘All’
you have to do is then get a PC monitor extension cable, lop the
female end off that, then do the very same on the cable you have
for your RGB monitor. Have a look at the Ultimarc site –
each monitor is different, but essentially you’re looking
to knit together the red, green, blue, horizontal and vertical
sync wires. If your monitor mentions composite sync rather than
listing two separate pins for horizontal and vertical, then just
tie the two wires together from the cable coming out of the PC.
You’re then truly good to go.
That sorted, I now had to plumb the monitor
into the cab somehow. Opening up the cab was like opening up a
treasure box – like opening up my grandad’s World
War II chest when I found it unlocked one day. And my, my, had
the films got it wrong… The army uniform is actually made
of a glossy black rubber to reduce air drag and has a zip over
the mouth to stop you swallowing birds and balloons.
Menu…
I took out the logic boards (the computer, basically)
and stripped the cab down so I could start afresh. I’m not
the sharpest knife in the corpse when it comes to woodwork, but
even I was bold enough to yank the old display out of the cab.
I feared not the warnings of playing with bare CRT tubes –
apparently you only get killed if you try to pull off the anode
on the top of the tube, I read it on the Net so it must be true.
I unscrewed the chipboard surround from the monitor, opened up
the case of the Philips with a Phillips (see what I did there),
then cut up the surround using, literally, a saw to match the
size of the CM-8833 tube. Then chucked back in the cab –
job done.
There’s no high art to putting a PC together
– these days, you can pretty much throw them together like
Lego. The kind of system you go for depends on the kind of games
you want to emulate. If you’re looking to play pretty recent
games, you’ll need a relatively high-specced PC. On the
opposing hand, if you want to play Mr. Do and Bomb Jack then take
that redundant K6-2 400 PC out from the cupboard and rip it to
shreds – it’s a perfect base system for that level.
PLAY!
Being an indecisive tyke, I lie in the middle.
I like to emulate games from the mid ‘80s to early ‘90s.
So, for me, nothing more than a Duron 1300 is required to get
me engorged and throbbing with excitement. My cab didn’t
have enough room for a standard PC case, so I just mounted the
motherboard on the slab of wood running through the centre. In
addition to the Arcade VGA, the other must-have was a silent fan,
otherwise the cab would’ve sounded like it was about to
take off. A £6 Cooler Master effort from Ebuyer fits the
bill suitably. Sound was routed to the speaker already in the
cab by wiring the audio-out of the motherboard to the input of
the monitor, then swapping the connection from the monitors’
speaker to the one already inside the cabinet.
Wiring up the controls was the second-to-last
thing to do. I decided to hack up a keyboard for the joystick
controls, and use a gamepad to do the buttons. The reason I didn’t
use a gamepad for the lot is because there’s a certain amount
of ‘jitter’ even when the pad is central, because
even digital pads are actually inherently analogue-based –
and, as we all know, digital is best. Fine for the buttons, though
– all I did here was open up the pad, and wire the requisite
switch on the front panel of the cab to the corresponding bit
of metal on the pad. The keyboard was another matter, though.
Similar concept to wiring up the pad – just match the terminal
underneath the key to the direction on the joystick. But rather
than being nicely laid out like a gamepad is, it’s like
a grid. Except it’s not like a grid – it’s a
fucking mess. I had to trace back the directional arrow keys back
to the keyboard encoder that plugs directly into the keyboard
port, and solder the two bits of wire for each direction on the
joystick to the requisite pins on the edge connector. But once
you’re in the mode of trace-mode, it ain’t too bad.
Hoo-hoo, baby!
The final, pushing question was whether I go
for a standard Windows installation or use DOS. I decided on DOS
for stability, not just to make myself sound more remarkable.
That’s one of my Life Crimes – people who have fuck-all
interesting properties themselves who try to use/get/buy/give
birth to something interesting so they can talk about it. Nope,
my reason was that DOS runs lighter and purer. I grabbed a version
that would work directly with the on-board sound on the motherboard,
and took the first front-end I could find (AdvanceMenu, for those
who care). This means I could do away with hateful command-line
arguments to load each game, and just select it from a list.
And that was it – a perfectly serviceable
arcade machine, all for me. Although I’ll never consider
it finished – it will always be an ongoing thing. My next
project is to make the monitor rotatable in an Atari Lynx, which-way-do-you-want-me?
style, so I’ll be able to play vertical games as they ought
to be. In some ways, mucking about inside it is just as much fun
as playing the games themselves.
The little lady, standing proud.
That’s your lot. Some of you might be
able to use this as a guide, or at least something to spur you
along if you were looking to have your own cab but lacked the
guile to start. You can always print it out and burn it. Just
think of building your cab as being like doing a big jigsaw. I
love doing jigsaws - I’m hoping the next one turns out to
be pornographic.
Time to fire up the cab and have a quick blast
on ‘The Bible Of The Expositor And The Evangelist’
By W. B. Riley – Arcade Edition.
That link again - www.ultimarc.com
Ebuyer - www.ebuyer.com
MAME - www.mame.net
Gun
Smoke
What that last joke means
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