| Another couple of months
went by and Brad had the control panels cut and partially assembled.
He spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to conceal
the trackball cover plate with the veneer. He did it and the
result looks very professional. We installed all of the controls
in my panel and spent about 4 hours wiring everything up. Brad
daisy-chained all of the ground wires and I ran the rest. We
used crimp on connectors and the most expensive wire zip ties
known to man. Add $100 more for wire, zip ties, and connectors.
Once mine was complete I started testing it with Mame and adjusting
all the control and in files to work with my setup.
Next on my agenda was to try and find a suitable monitor.
If all you want to do is run Mame, cheap monitors will work
just fine. I wanted to be able to read the text in windows
and run other programs. After a few weeks of shopping I ordered
a Wells Gardner D9200 27” VGA digital multi-sync monitor.
This little beauty ran $600. That’s a running total
of around $2,200 and we are still missing a bunch of stuff
like the cabinets. The monitor was awesome. I set it up in
my computer room with the computer and the control panel and
tweaked Mame for another few weeks until everything was nearly
perfect.
You can’t build an arcade machine today without having
Golden Tee on it. I looked all over for a pc version of Golden
Tee. There was a version release in 2000 for the pc, Golden
Tee 2K. I bought a used copy and installed it. The graphics
are actually much better than the arcade version. The trackball
worked great with it, but I wasn’t impressed. Wandering
through a local software store I noticed they had Tiger Woods
golf 2003 in the clearance bin for 20 bucks. I bought it and
installed it on the machine and wow, now this was a great
golf game. I’m not sure if Electronic Arts had ever
intended for it to be used with a trackball but it works great.
The graphics are incredible and it had a lot of game play
modes. So now the machine does Mame and golf really well.
More months went by. I bugged Brad to get started on the
cabinets and he did. I took a few days off work and went to
his house to help him build the cabinets. We worked on them
in his garage and about 40 yards away are wetlands, otherwise
known as mosquito heaven. In between being eaten alive by
mosquitoes and the numerous calls Brad got we made great progress.
The cabinets were built, we mounted Brad’s monitor,
subwoofer, and, coin door (the one from Putt Putt), and it
was almost ready. Brad delivered my cabinet about a month
later and we installed all the goodies. I can’t tell
you the exact figure but I believe we had spent at least another
$1,000 in parts and goodies. Finally, a working Mame machine.
NEXT >
|
