kernow said:
I've got a spare tiny VIA mobo with onboard sound, and a 1.2Ghz tbird, 256MB RAM, and a pci gf5200FX 128MB
I'm looking into making this a mame cabinet, but in a console form, the card supposedly has great s-video out, and comes with a 2meter long cable.. so woot.
planning on using as lightweight a software as possible and maybe even writing my own frontend, as all the ones I see I don't think are 'consoley' enough.
considering using a win98 install/DOS/or a tailored linux distro based on slackware, I just want some pointers (hendrix?) from people who've done it before, I plan to have two dreamcast sticks connected, and switchable buttons etc, in an easy fashion for each game, possibly configs for each game or something so it automatically changes the buttions.
I'd love a box I could sit in front of the tv and netplay people on. yeah I'd only play games I own ..yadda yadda.
post your ideas!
Alright here's how I did it:
I use my HTPC for more than ROMZ, so I didn't do a complete custom setup. Really all I did was get an
ATi Remote Wonder and setup Windows XP on a AMD Shuttle box. I setup a nice background image and strategically placed icons to give it a nice UI so I can just turn it on and hit whatever EMU I wanted.
You could obviously setup a nice Linux based front end, there are a number of DOS based alternatives as well (ArcadeOS is something I've heard a million times, dunno how good it is for TV use).
Anyway, I like MAME32, works great and you can set it up to use joystick 1 to navigate up and down and select a game. I run it at 800x600 (no HDTV for me yet) so I increased the font and icon sizes and set the default view to snapshot. Basically it's a hack to get things to look nice but it only uses MAME32's interface, it's just way more useable on a TV and you don't have to fiddle with the mouse/remote.
A couple caveat's though. I enabled the mouse input for MAME and set the buttons to bring up MAME's menu (TAB normally) and to exit the game (ESC normally) since MAME32 doesn't play nice with ATi's keyboard emulator through the remote, although I am using the Remote Wonder 1, I linked you to the Remote Wonder 2, which may have solved this problem.
Your biggest concerns are your interface. How are you going to setup the controls to input into the system? Are you going to have a real keyboard (wireless?) hooked up? You mentioned online play, that practically necessitates a keyboard.
Now here's a fun tip. I have one massive ROM directory with a full set, I then setup multiple installations of MAME (just copy the directory over a few times with a different name). What this did was let me configure a Neo-Geo MAME, and my default config for that is the same across all games, the Neo layout.
Then I did a Capcom MAME, that had the SF control layout across all it's games. Then I made a generic "MAME" setup that had a specific control setup to play the few old school stuff I like that's not from SNK or Capcom. Just remember to keep the ROM directory external to each instance of the MAME directory and point each configuration of MAME to that ROM folder and you're set.
One other caveat you may have with your setup is to verify that the S-Video output on that card works as the primary output WITHOUT needing to have the VGA connected. There are many cards that will not do this, some do some don't, I do not know which chipsets are good for this. Also you want to find one that remembers your scaling/offset settings for the S-Video output every time you boot, again some cards don't do this.
Mine does, but I'm using the built in video/s-video out on my Shuttle, so I can't reccomend a good card for you to install. I do know the Radeon 9600 (non-pro) is absolutely horrible for S-Video, other than that I've got nothing.
That's all I've got off the top of me head, any other questions you can think of please fire away. I've done a couple of these setups for a lot of my friends. I'll see if I can take some pics of it tommorrow to show you how this all looks.
Oh one more thing. The DC sticks, might be a clincher. Since they only have 6 buttons it may be hard to do a Neo layout. I use Pelican Real Arcades with happs parts in em, and they have a more universal button layout you can config to do either SNK or Capcom style. The XBox stick linked in your other thread would work wonders for this as it's like the DC stick but it has more buttons. Also I highly reccomend a Dual XBox to one USB adapter for PC. It's what I and another friend use for our controls and it works perfectly, really good stuff.
Hope this helps.
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