luminousmonkey.org

MAMEhem

Monday 05 February 2007, 17:15 WST —

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I’ve got my hands on an old Leisure and Allied arcade machine, Street Fighter II’: Champion Edition to be exact. Currently I’m in the process of converting it into a MAME cabinet.

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Those blasted Drow

Monday 06 September 2004, 19:48 WST —

Last Sunday, I decided to make a trip down to, basically, the only Dungeons and Dragons club that I know of in Perth. THOHAH is a RPG club, and play RPGs, and I have to admit it was damn fun. I’ve always wanted to give D&D a go, but I could never find experienced players. Well after a little bit of research (which to be honest I really should have done sooner) I located them.

I sent off a quick e-mail to one of the DMs asking if it was alright if I came down to watch, and before I knew it I was rolling up a character. My first ability roll gave me an 18 (highest score you can get), unfortunately the rest of my rolls, ending up being below 9 (very bad results), and after about 5 more tries, I got some stats to play with.

It took me awhile to get a character going, but the other players were patient while I got it sorted and we were underway. To be perfectly honest, but roleplaying ability just sucked, now I mean really bad, but trying to act or think like a dwarven fighter in front of a bunch of strangers is an odd thing to do.

Anyway, long story short I’ll be heading down there a few more times and see if my roleplaying ability gets any better, if anyone hasn’t tried it I recommend it, it’s better than time spent watching TV.

CPMA Sunday “Fight Night”

Thursday 26 August 2004, 16:14 WST —

Unknown to most people I’m sure, is that I enjoy playing the Quake III Mod. CPMA, I would have to enjoy playing it, as I very often get my arse handed back to me.

This Sunday, the 29th to be exact. We’re basically getting a group of players together for some CPMA games. It’s not a competition or anything, just a group of players getting together to have some fun. It’ll be happening 8PM Eastern Australia Time, so give or take the necessary hours. You can either join #promode_au on irc.enterthegame.com around 7:30PM EST, or, if you fancy keep an eye on these servers:

• PGN CPMA #1 – cpma.quake.net.au:27960
• PGN CPMA #2 – cpma.quake.net.au:27961
• DogMeat – 203.173.249.177:27965

So come join for some fun.

A plan, a plan, my kingdom for a plan

Saturday 17 April 2004, 12:45 WST —

Quick update, here’s a little bit of the plan. It’s not right yet, but I’m working on it.

If you’re after a PDF of my current draft, you can find it here. There’s a few mistakes on it, and I really want to get a slight angle on the control panel. But that’s the general gist of it. Measurements are all metric, because that’s what we use here…

In the beginning

Saturday 17 April 2004, 12:37 WST —

I’ve been wanting to make an arcade cabinet for some time, basically because there is no better way to play arcade games, except on an arcade cabinet.

So I’ve decided to go about making one, pretty much just like every other person who’s done it, I’m going to keep track of my progress on my web site. Unfortunately, I don’t have very much spare cash lying around, and to top that off I’m also fairly lazy. So progress is going to be VERY slow.

At the moment, I’m in the planning stage, need to figure out what I want from an arcade cabinet. I’m a fan of the Street Fighter games, although I’ve never been, really, really, serious about it (I’ve never felt the need to spend 3 hours a day trying to perfect combos, et al), I do like the design of the typical Street Fighter cabinet. Luckly for me, somebody who came in fairly often to where I work (Direct Communications, Australia’s No. 1 Tait dealer) has just bought a 4 player Street Fighter cabinet. I’m not exactly why it’s a 4 player cabinet, however it’s of the design that I like, and when it arrives I’ll be able to take some measurements of it for my own.

Ok, so my goal is for a 4 player cabinet, that I can also use for Street Fighter. So I’m guessing what I’ll need will be two player spots in the prime position with the full 6 buttons with the other 2 players either side with only about 3 or 4 buttons.  So, the parts I’ll need here are:

• 4 Joysticks
• 20 Player buttons
• 4 Player start buttons

I’m looking at the Happ Control 8-way Ultimate Joystick it comes in 5 different colours (which means I can have a different colour for each player) and seems like a pretty good choice. It’s really hard to tell how good one joystick is over another, check out the Happ Controls Joystick page for an idea of the selection available.

Also, I want the joystick panel/assembly to be modular, so I can remove it and change it with another set of controls to suit different games (like Ikari warriors, and Heavy Barrel for example). I got this idea off reading someone elses MAME cabinet site (which I can’t actually find anymore, if I happen to find it I’ll link to his site). This will take a bit more effort to plan, but it’s better in the long run.

I’ve got a few options on how to interface these with the computer, by far the best option seems to be the I-PAC⁴ Board.  This nifty bit of gear plugs into the keyboard port of the computer (so no driver hassles, although it does support USB as well), and has enough inputs on it to support 4 joysticks with 8 buttons each, as well as the extra buttons (coin 1, 2, etc).  And apparently there’ll be no keyboard matrix issues (which means that if everyone is using all the joysticks and buttons at the same time no buttons go dead.

Also, the same company makes a video card for interfacing 15kHz monitors (the one’s arcade machines use) to the PC with no other modifications necessary. This is going to be essential, because I want to put the biggest monitor that I can into the cabinet (hopefully 27inch or more) and trying to get a computer monitor that size, will be, well, expensive. However a 27inch 60Hz TV, or arcade monitor, I know I can get them fairly cheap.  Luckly for me I also happen to work across the road from an arcade repair shop.