Good MAME progress

Made wonderful progress over the weekend.

Power switch.
The toggle switch is installed and turns everything on. Here are the parts needed. A power strip, electrical box and cover plate, orange extension cord (8 ft), toggle switch, and heat shrink tubing. Look carefully at the connector on the orange cord. That's why I no longer used it, but just knew that one day I would have use for the wire.


Fisrt thing I did was strip some of the wire in the orange cord...the white and the black. There is no ground connection needed so I cut the green wire flush. I then soldered the wires to the toggle switch and covered the connections with heat shrink tubing. I've now brushed up on my soldering skills...not to be used for another 20 years?



Then I cut the power cord on the power strip leaving about 8 inches. I mounted the blue plastic box to the base of the cabinet, then pushed the 3 cables (2 blacks and one orange) into the box. Made all the connections and closed it up. The picture confuses...you have to mentally block out any wire that is plugged into the power strip. There are 4 things plugged into the power strip...2 black wires and 2 white.


Then I mounted the toggle switch in the top. In this picture the switch is on ( because the fluorescent light is on).



Monitor.
I removed the old monitor and cut a board to fit. Drilled finger holes in the corners for if and when I need to pull it out (have already done that several times).


To mount the monitor I needed 4 threaded studs to fit into holes on the back of the monitor. I got a threaded rod and used a Dremel to cut it into 4 pieces. The nuts in the picture are to "clean up" the thread after the cutting is done.


Then I put on nice little brass Knurled nuts.


I made a template of the mounting holes on the back of the monitor, drilled the holes in the board, put the studs into the monitor holes, laid the board onto the studs (so they come through the holes, and then secured with the knurled nuts. Getting ahead with this picture, but you now see the completed monitor installation.


Windows XP boots up sideways, but the arcade front end launches at startup time and the games come up in the correct orientation. When this is all done there will not be a keyboard and mouse in easy reach, so it is important to start up right to the arcade front end and exit that into shut down.

If you look closely you see a white button coming through the bottom left hole of the monitor board.



Power button.
Today's PCs have a power button on front of the tower. If you turn off a power strip, then turn it back on, the PC goes into a standby mode...not ON. So you have to push the button. Well, in this system that tower is inside a cabinet. So I did a little research. Found that the power button is a switch that is "normally open". When you press the button the switch "closes" and the power supply detects the little 5 Volts that are sent along the two small wires.

No problem!! The arcade buttons are set up with normally open switches and 5V is nothing! So I mounted a white button on the front of the cabinet, way up above the monitor, by the speakers. The picture above shows how I had it when I was getting it all to work. The picture below shows it in it's final location.


Then I used some old telephone wire to hook it up. I cut the power button wires inside the PC and hooked the other end of the phone wires to those wires. Works absolutely perfect! To turn on my system I now flip the toggle switch and press the button. The tan colored wire in the picture below is the one that runs from the new white power button and into the back of the PC tower.


So you can see in this picture where the button is mounted (by the left speaker above the monitor) and my son playing PacMan.



NEW PC !!!
At the flea market I found a Pentium 4 tower for $150. Brought it home, dumped the software onto it, and rigged up the power button. It runs perfectly. The system works so well that I have placed all the components inside and started bundling the wires. I am going to staple wires to the cabinet sides later for neatness, but for now just wanted to have them untangled and fairly neat.

Tokens.
The arcade cabinet had 14 brass tokens in the bottom. They were very dirty and tarnished. Since I want this machine to be run by tokens I thought these could use a cleanup. We soaked them in "Tarn-X" for a little bit. Most of the discoloration came off and they look vastly improved. But I think they can use some more cleaning (the picture shows the best 2). Here's a before and after.



What's next.
So next up will be to start working on the control panel and also a monitor "bezel". A bezel is the trim piece that masks all the ugliness behind. For raw material, I picked up a piece of black foam board at an arts and crafts store. It isn't the exact dimensions needed, but the bezel will also be covered by a piece of plastic that will be painted black around the edges, so together they should make for a nice screen appearance.