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A vacation in Nieuwpoort, at the Belgian coast, somewhere in the eighties... that's where my passion for arcade games started. I remember having played Track & Field, Hang On and Pole Position almost every day. I was hooked! At home, I bought the versions which were available for home computers, but unfortunately those 'clones' couldn't beat the real thing. Years went by, pc's became more powerfull, games became better, and my interest in the arcades got lost.

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One day, I believe it was in 1997, I came across a program called MAME on the internet. It could emulate Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, Crush Roller, Pengo and Lady Bug. The concept of emulation was unique, because it brought back the sounds, graphics and game play of the original versions. I haven't missed one single version of MAME since that moment, looking forward to each release to see if some of my favorite games have been emulated. My interest grew even more when my girlfriend Marcia seemed to have the same nostalgic feelings about games like Puzzle Bobble, Pang and Pac Man. But it was cumbersome to play MAME with two people on an ordinary keyboard. Wouldn't it be cool to actually have a real arcade cabinet in our house, on which we could play those classic games we both are fond of?

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I found out pretty quickly I wasn't the only one who had this idea. Lots of people made their own cabinets, most of them using the PC2JAMMA project. The technical stuff, which involves a lot of wiring, could be handled by my dad, who was a technician before he retired. The difficult part however, would be to find a second hand cabinet. On Ebay lots of machines were offered, but where could I find one in Belgium?

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When I read in the local newspapers there was an exhibition of coin-up machines in the Toy Museum of Mechelen, organized by two Belgian collectors, my interest started to grow even more. If those guys were able to find second hand cabinets, I should be able to find one as well! I called some distributors, but they did not have second hand machines. And if they did, they were overpriced. I almost gave up hope. In a final attempt, I asked for help on the rec.games.video.arcade.marketplace newsgroup. This is where I met Bart, a Belgian arcade collector. He wrote me he might have got something for me.

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August 2000 - My girlfriend and I drove over to Bart, who had a bunch of old second hand machines in his basement. In a dusty corner I found a machine which suited my needs: a standard cabinet with two joysticks, and three buttons per player. Bad news was that the monitor was broken, there was no JAMMA connector, and the back wall was missing. But Bart was willing to fix up the machine for me, and wire everything according to the JAMMA standard. In the mean while, I looked at the the PC2JAMMA project in detail, and I found out there was a major problem with the keyboard-hack we were planning to use. If two or more keys are pressed at the same time, a so called 'ghosting' effect might pop up, which means the keystrokes are not correctly send to the computer. Soon it became clear that there simply was no quick and dirty solution to this problem. I abandoned the PC2JAMMA project and looked out for other solutions, like wiring up two Microsoft SideWinder joysticks to the JAMMA fingerboard, which seemed a good idea at first, but it would mean I had to buy two joysticks just to destroy them afterwards. Furthermore, there was a lot of (re)wiring involved. Finally I found a good solution at Arttu's pages. This guy converted a JAMMA cabinet to be used by MAME using the LP24, a piece of electronics from Hagstrom which enables you to send keystrokes to the keyboard port without breaking up the keyboard. I decided to combine Arttu's project with the monitor-interruption circuit which I found at PC2JAMMA. Ordering the LP24 in the United States was really easy. After writing an email, the friendly people at Hagstrom told me the LP24 costed $79.95 (3700 BEF). The cable to connect the unit to the keyboard port costed an additional 5.95$ (270 BEF). Air Mail shipment to Belgium was 22,50$ (1000 BEF). I ordered the kit by fax and VISA card. My first initial plan was to build my brother's old 486/66 in the cabinet, but the Neo Geo emulation was too slow. I had to buy a new mainboard with a faster processor. This was a good occasion to upgrade my own computer, and put my 'old' Pentium 2/400 processor in the MAME computer. I also needed a new case and 64MB memory, since both were not compatible with the new mainboard. About 80% of all games can run at full speed on this computer. The biggest games like Metal Slug 2 need more memory though, so probably I'll have to add 64MB in the near future.

.	September 13th, 2000 - The LP24 arrived at home. I had to pay $30 (1400 BEF) import duties. A lot of money for a small piece of electronics, but at least I know this solution actually works.

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September 15th, 2000 - Bart called me to tell the machine was ready. Almost everything inside the cabinet had been replaced. There was a new front glass, a good Wells Gardner K9 monitor and everything was rewired to the JAMMA standard. I also got a fingerboard and some extra buttons for free. Two problems still had to be resolved: there was only one speaker in the cabinet, and the coindoors were not wired. Furthermore, the cabinet itself was in a bad state. Pieces of wood were missing, and the side walls needed a repaint. Transporting the machine to the place I live, was cumbersome. The cabinet was fairly big, and the weight made it hard to handle. My dad had to come along with his car to help me out, and we had to drive home with an open trunk. The weight of the cabinet prevented us descending the machine to my parent's basement, so we put our new 'toy' in the garage till we found an alternative solution.

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September 18th, 2000 Dad started to gather all the connectors and cables we needed in our project: a VGA monitor cable to connect the PC to the arcade monitor, a SCSI cable to connect the LP24 to the JAMMA fingerboard and an audio cable to be able to listen to all those nice sounds arcade games make.

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September 19th, 2000 The cables were connected to the fingerboard. In order to be able to perform some tests to see if the joysticks and buttons actually worked with the LP24, we needed direct access to the cabinet, which was still in the garage. This meant we'd had to remove the monitor from the cabinet, to lessen the weight, and be able to transport the machine. Because we needed daylight to do this, and since I'm working during the day, testing was postponed.

.	September 23th, 2000 I tried to make a marquee by printing the MAME logo on two transparent papers - the ones used to make a slide show for presentations. The print turned out to be really cool, but I don't have a clue on how to put the print on glass.

.	September 24th, 2000 My dad disassembled a part of the cabinet, but the monitor was too heavy to be removed. Next attempt will be on Thursday evening.

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September 28th, 2000 We went to the garage and took out the monitor, but the cabinet still weighted a ton. We did succeed in transporting the empty cabinet to my parent's house though, and with a lot of force we managed to descend the machine to the entrance of the basement. However, that's exactly as far as we got. The machine was too big to make the sharp turn needed to get into the cellar. Major bummer. We'll have to saw the cabinet in pieces before we even can think about transporting this heavy brick to our apartment on the fifth floor after the conversion has been done. After much consideration, I decided to configure the LP24 with 1 row and 23 columns. This is the only configuration which enables us to keep the whole cabinet JAMMA compatible. We could use two rows and 22 columns, but that would mean that: 1. there are two grounds (JAMMA only has one) and 2. you cannot press a key from the first row and the second row together (ghosting). The 23 free columns are just big enough for all the basic MAME commands. The only sacrifice I had to make is the fourth button, but since my cabinet only has three buttons, I knew I had to make this decision one day or another. To access MAME functions like 'menu', 'cancel' and 'pause', we decided to make a kind of 'remote control' with those buttons on it. Pin B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X A U1 D1 L1 R1 U2 D2 L2 R2 P1 P2 11 12 13 21 22 23 C1 C2 SEL TAB OSD ESC PAU TO JAMMA U1 = joystick up player 1 = [cursor up] D1 = joystick down player 1 = [cursor down] L1 = joystick left player 1 = [cursor left] R1 = joystick right player 1 = [cursor right] U2 = joystick up player 2 = R D2 = joystick down player 2 = F L2 = joystick left player 2 = D R2 = joystick right player 2 = G P1 = 1 player start = 1 P2 = 2 players start = 2 11 = button 1 player 1 = [left ctrl] 12 = button 2 player 1 = [alt] 13 = button 3 player 1 = [space] 21 = button 1 player 2 = A 22 = button 2 player 2 = S 23 = button 3 player 2 = Q C1 = coin 1 = 5 C2 = coin 2 = 6 TO EXTRA BUTTONS SEL = select = [enter] TAB = config menu = [tab] OSD = on screen display = ~ ESC = cancel = [esc] PAU = pause = P

.	October 2nd, 2000 Dad has removed all the electronics from the cabinet. The wires, joysticks and buttons are now lying on his workbench. I'll have to bring the MAME computer to my parent's house, so we can start testing to see if the LP24 works as it should.

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October 4th, 2000 We used an old portable pc to do some testing, and the video portion of the JAMMA cable is working now! We installed ARCADEOS and MAME, and actually saw Track & Field running on the arcade monitor!! Bad news concerning the LP24 though: the joysticks and buttons are not sending any information to the portable.

.	October 5th, 2000 A broken wire was found on the JAMMA fingerboard, the LP24 was not configured like it should, and there were some problems with the ground wiring. Everything is working ok now!

.	October 6th, 2000 My dad and I played a Puzzle Bobble-match on the actual MAME computer! All the controls are working now. However, vertical games like Pac Man and Popeye make the monitor go nuts. After adjusting the vertical hold the image turns up ok, but a part is missing on the top and bottom.

.	October 8th, 2000 After turning on the tweaked modes in mame.cfg, Popeye is now showing up ok, but Pac Man is still driving the monitor nuts. I have posted a message on the mame.net board, and people told me I should use AdvanceMAME to play vertical games on my horizontal monitor.

.	October 9th, 2000 Dad has bought a 2 x 30 watt amplifier kit for the stereo sound. After using AdvanceMAME, all vertical games are now running (with some loss of lines) on the horizontal monitor! There is some extra tweaking necessary though, due to lack of time I will do that on Thursday evening.

.	October 10th, 2000 The fingerboard has been equipped with a plastic brace in order to prevent wires from breaking.

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October 12th, 2000 The stereo audio amplifier is working! We reconfigured the video modes in AdvanceMAME, and we ended up with ten different settings. All the games are now shown in full-screen. Dad tried to get the coindoor to work, but the pins on the JAMMA connector are broken and need to be rewired. The mechanical part of the coindoor is working perfectly, the slot accepts pieces of 20 BEF and rejects pieces of 5 and 50 BEF.

.	October 18th, 2000 We have found five small buttons to act as select, menu, OSD, cancel and pause buttons. Dad will assemble them on a pcb in the next few days.

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October 26th, 2000 The 'remote control' with the five extra buttons which are not supported by the JAMMA standard, is ready. I made a sticker with my ink jet printer to be used as a backdrop on the remote control. The technical side of the project is finished now. Next thing to do is to saw the cabinet in pieces. Keep your fingers crossed!

.	October 31st, 2000 The BIOS of the Matrox card was updated, which resulted in A LOT more VESA modes for MAME. Cool!

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November 1st, 2000 The big day. Dad started sawing the machine in two. This went surprisingly well, and after ten minutes we ended up with two parts. Yipee! The cabinet is finally portable now, since top and bottom only weight half of the cabinet in its full size. We used the occasion to clean up all the spider webs and dust which were still present since I bought the original machine back in September. In order to be able to put the top back on the bottom of the machine, we screwed a piece of wood to the bottom to prevent the two parts from moving. This works perfect, and if you don't know it, it's really hard to see where the two parts come together! Next thing to do is to fill the holes and repair all the broken wood inside and outside the cabinet.

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November 11th, 2000 The holes and broken parts on the machine are repaired using a special gel to fix up wood. Dad painted the wood for the first time in black. The old (mono) loudspeaker, which was sitting in the middle of the top of the cabinet under the marquee light, was removed. Two new holes were drilled to fit the two stereo loudspeakers.

.	November 25th, 2000 The machine got a second coat of paint and is ready now. Next Friday, we will transport the cabinet to our apartment.

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December 1st, 2000 We transported the two parts of the machine, the monitor, the computer and all the cables to our apartment. Luckily it was already dark when we crossed the street with the cabinet, otherwise some people would have been surprised to see what we were doing. Thanks to that bright idea I had to saw the cabinet in two, we were able to move the cabinet to the fifth floor without any problem at all. But after assembling the two parts of the cabinet, we noticed that the case of the pc which runs MAME was too big to fit in the back! A disaster! Having to put our pc next to the cabinet would have ruined the magic of having a real arcade machine in our home... ...but that didn't happen since we had (just) enough room behind the marquee light on top of the cabinet to put the power supply. Some wires, like the ones to the coindoor, were not long enough anymore, so this has to be fixed later on. But at least, the pc could be placed inside the cabinet now. Disaster number two: when we started the machine, the screen was scrolling, there were colored spots on the screen, and the bottom lines were flickering. The scrolling was due to a broken sync wire on the JAMMA fingerboard. However, the color spots, probably caused by a magnetic field while we transported the monitor, did not go away, nor did the flickering. We thought the power supply was the cause and went back to the original plan: we moved the supply back to the bottom of the cabinet and put the pc next to it. But to no avail. The result was still the same, although the automatic degauss on the monitor seemed to make the spots grow smaller every time we booted up. So we rewired the whole cabinet once more and put the power supply back to its original position on top.

.	December 2nd, 2000 Dad made the wires towards the coindoor longer. We've got light!

.	December 14th, 2001 The colored spots on the screen went away after we had the fantastic idea to put the cabinet against another wall. There must be some kind of magnetic field somewhere...

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January 27th, 2001 BIIIIIIG TROUBLE! I started copying a new set of roms from the ZIP drive to the PC and went to the living room to read something. When I came back, the monitor was not working anymore! Dad came over to see what's wrong. He noticed that the (American) fuse on the transformer had melted and suspects a monitor problem.

.	January 28th, 2001 We took the monitor to a friend of my father, who determined the THT was broken and could not be repaired anymore. The search for another Wells Gardner 19 inch monitor has begun.

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March 16th, 2001 It has been a while since the last update. My search for a new second hand Wells Gardner was not successful. There were firms offering new models, but their prices were way to high. So dad and I opted for another solution: to use an ordinary television set. The plan is now to remove all the (American) 120V electronics from the cabinet, since the transformer is not working anymore, and only use 230V. Today I drove to Verviers to buy a second hand television set for 3000 BEF. Now it's dad's turn again to remove the case and try to fit the screen inside the old monitor frame.

.	April 2nd, 2001 Since the television screen measures 21 inch, and the old monitor 19 inch, dad has had a little trouble to fit the frame. But he succeeded and everything is ready for testing.

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April 4th, 2001 Dad came over to our apartment with the television and the chassis. Since the new tv screen is two inches larger compared to the old monitor, we weren't sure everything would fit, but we were lucky. The old 120V transformer and the marquee light were removed. During one of the next days, we will put a new 230V marquee light in the machine. The transformer is not needed anymore. Since the chassis of a television screen is much larger than the chassis of a monitor, we had to remove the PC from the cabinet to make room in the back. The tower PC is now standing next to the arcade machine. Too bad, but it's a sacrifice we absolutely had to make. Perhaps we can find a second hand portable someday, or at least a pc with a smaller case... Anyway, good thing is that the chassis also hosts a part of the television remote control, so we can now adapt brightness and colors without turning small knobs (like we had to do with the previous monitor). The red, green, blue and sync wires were recabled to a SCART plug, which could be put in the television set. Dad wired 12V from somewhere inside the television chassis to the selector pin (pin 8), also on the internal circuit, so the internal circuit would jump to SCART mode as soon as we put the tv on. However, after turning on the PC, the image on the television set is distorted. Something must be wrong, but what...?

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April 12th, 2001 It turned out some wires on the SCART connector were not connected as they should. The correct layout is as follows: PIN JAMMA wire 5 video ground 7 video blue 9 video ground 11 video green 13 video ground 15 video red 17 video ground 20 video sync We have put a resistor of 560 ohm from pin 8 to pin 16. This converts the 12V (SCART selector) which is present on the chassis on pin 8 to 1,5V on pin 16, which puts the television in RGB mode. All grounds are shared, so we simply wired the video ground from the JAMMA board to pin 5 and made a bridge to the other pins. If you want to make your own SCART cable, but are not willing to modify the circuit inside your television, you'll need 1.5V on pin 16 (with a battery, for instance). Turns out the television set is capable of showing over 60 different screen configurations, ranging from 45 till 65Hz! I've installed AdvanceMame 0.37 beta 13, but there seem to be a lot of bugs in this version. Most games either lock up the computer, or launching them simply exits MAME to DOS mode.

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June 15th, 2001 I installed AdvanceMAME beta 15, and for the first time I am able to see all the games in my cabinet as they were meant to be seen! The new configuration utility (called CFG.EXE) generates arcade-perfect videomodes without having to resize and center about 60 different screens, like I had to do in the previous versions.

.	July 18th, 2001 Installed ArcadeOS 2.46 and AdvanceMAME 0.37b16. Dad started working on a new cover to mask the borders of the television screen, since the old one for the original Wells Gardner monitor was not fitting well.

.	July 22th, 2001 The new mask to cover the sides of the television set was installed. The cabinet is now as good as ready. A good occasion to pose in front of the machine and show off what we made out of it!

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July 30th, 2001 I started using AdvanceMenu and deleted ArcadeOS, which is not developed anymore. AdvanceMenu has got some advantages over ArcadeOS, like better support for arcade monitors. In the mean time I also added 64 meg to the internal memory, so I now have 128 megs. To my surprise, big games like 'Garou' and 'Metal Slug X' still did not work. Turned out that MAME's memory manager (CWSDPMI) was trying to make a swapfile on drive C:, which does not have enough free space. I adapted my AUTOEXEC.BAT to automatically preload CWSDPMI with the correct swapfile name and location.

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July 1st, 2003 Some people have asked me if I'm still alive and playing on my MAME machine. The answers are: yes and yes! It's been a while since I have updated this site, which does not mean I have thrown the arcade cabinet away... there is just little to tell. Last year, I have moved to a new home, and the arcade cabinet has been updated over the months to the latest MAME versions. The machine is still kept up to date with new ROMS, but I'm not playing games anymore as much as I used to. Every once in a while though, I cannot resist a quickie on 'Track & Field' or 'Tetris'. In the mean while, dad and I had to replace the ventilator and add a new harddisk (running out of space because of all the ROMS).

.	June 15th, 2006 It seems that AdvanceMAME is not developed anymore. So I have decided to keep this MAME machine at version 0.79, and start working with the Windows version on a cabinet. Recent emulated games require a faster processer anyway, and the Pentium2 simply isn't strong enough...

.	December 11th, 2006 Time to upgrade MAME01. AdvanceMAME is dead, so I have ordered an ArcadeVGA board for 103 euro (shipment and taxes included).

.	December 26th, 2006 MAME01 is dead, long live MAME01! A new motherboard has been installed, and MAME01 and MAME02 now share the same ROM database on a shared hard disc.

to be continued...

Wim Dewijngaert

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MAME PC: AMD athlon XP2000+ 512MB memory Windows XP operating system 20 gig total hard disk capacity ArcadeVGA CD-ROM drive Creative Labs CT4810 soundcard GameEx frontend Arcade carbinet: width: 0,58m height: 1,70m depth: 0,75m 21 inch television screen two joysticks three buttons per player two play start buttons on the front coin door with two coin slots