Fighter pilots needed in sector wars!
Play Astro Blaster!

I (mis)spent a lot of my youth in various cafe's playing arcade games - Space Invaders, Galaxians, and the like. The last game I remember from that era is Dragon's Lair, which I didn't like at all. I guess I grew out of it after that. I recently started playing MAME, and rediscovering old friends. MAME *rocks* :-)

• Cabinet I had this bright idea of building or obtaining an arcade cabinet (Provisionally titled Astro Pinball) and then building a PC running AdvanceMAME , GalEmu , or JROK's excellent JAS in there (requires MMX, unfortunately). It's not a new idea, and you can find out more by starting at The Arcade Control Center FAQ and taking it from there.

  The problem, of course, is that I'm in sunny South Africa, home of biltong, boerewors, and generic arcade cabinets. Because of high shipping costs, machines are kept running for much longer than would be the case in the USA. When the cabinet wears out, a new one gets built locally. Also, with the exception of the newests games, pirated game boards are available at about 2/3 of the price of the genuine article. These boards are imported from the east and built into the locally manufactured cabinets. As a result, our local arcades look something like: Pic #1, Pic #2, and Pic #3 (That's a Bartman in Pic 3, bootleg Pacman with hacked graphics).

  So, as you can see, I will have to build by own cabinet from scratch. This, also, has been done before, Kevin Umbach built a really awesome Defender cabinet based on the dimensions that Brien King put up on his web page (look under "Restoration Data"). I've always liked Galaxians, so my cabinet will be a Galaxians/Pac Man/Galaga (Bally/Midway) look-alike, with a vertical monitor and a removeable control panel. (Update 2001-12-05: There's a difference between a Galaxians cabinet and a Galaga cabinet. Galaxians and Pac Man are the same. Galaga and Ms Pac Man are the same.)

• My Cabinet Dimensions, pictures, and eventually enough info to build your own Galaga / PacMan cabinet.

• Controls I found a local supplier (Indoor Amusements) of all things game related here in the Cape Town area. So far I've purchased a joystick and two buttons - I'm told that these are manufactured locally.

• Monitor I like the older games, Galaxians, Galaga, Pacman, etc. They're all fairly low resolution, 288x224 games, so I can use a TV set or old arcade monitor.

  To use a TV set, the emulator should produce PAL (South Africa, remember) video. I was playing with the MAME source, trying to generate 288x224 PAL. Eventually gave it up (MAME now supports PAL anyway) -- I found out that many cards, including S3, are broken and don't support NTSC/PAL timings.

  I'd probably use an AD722 chip to convert the RGB+sync to PAL, see this circuit by Tomi Engdahl.

  • Update, 19990909: I scrounged a Mitsubishi C-3910ELP RGB monitor. A beautiful piece of work, gazillions of potentiometers for setting Finagle knows what. I've been told that the specifications might be close to that of the C-3919N, which are 40-70Hz Vertical, 15.5-23.5kHz Horizontal, and 350x280 max resolution. Looks like the perfect candidate for my arcade machine :-)

    If you want to use an RGB monitor, you will find Lupine's buffer circuit helpful.

  • Update, 20000117: Bought an ATI 3D Rage II+ card for R120 from Cape Ads. This card supports PAL timings, apparently.

• Side Art www.localarcade.com.

• Links
  • Emulaxian is a very well done site featuring a Galaxian themed MAME front end. Very Nice! Bit huge at 17megs, though
  • Dragons Den Sideart collection
  • RichyHo's MAME Box -- another PackMan cabinet built from scratch.
  • Sean Riddle is a *real* hacker. He shares a lot of information on Willams (Defender and the like) and Midway (Galaxian and co) hardware here. He has a pinball machine too! :-)
  • Tony Berry's page
  • APPOLO's Arcade Game restoration, artwork reproduction.
  • The Asylum MAME Cocktail Cabinet -- click on "an overview of the case layout" for dimensions.
  • The Usenet alt.games.mame FAQ.

(This page last modified 2004-07-29)