Alston Grove

I’ve been thinking about my MAME cabinet some more and I’ve set a goal of building it by Spring. I decided against my original idea of tongue-oiled hardwood — I want to make it classic, with black laminate, t-molding, coin-door, marquee, etc. I just got done reading “The Ultimate History of Video Games” by Steven Kent, and I am inspired.

I plan to use a 25-inch TV with svideo input. The doors in my house are 30-inch, and the cabinet needs to fit through without disassembly, which also means no speakers on the sides of the TV. Svideo gives a better picture because the RGB signals are separate. Do you know how hard it is to find a 25-inch TV with svideo and no side speakers? I finally found a Curtis Mathes TV that fits the bill at Kmart, of all places.

It goes unsaid that I will be running Linux. I got a CompactFlash to IDE adapter from Adi’s so I can boot Linux instantly from CF. There will be a hard drive partition mounted for ROMs and high scores. When you flip on the cab, it will boot straight to Pyrecade for the user to select their game. Pyrecade is written in Python and uses SDL for the slick graphics.

I’ve got most of my controls mounted on plywood and working well. My favorite game right now is Caveman Ninjas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Retro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.