25 March 2012

Cocktail arcade game was sold earlier this year. It gave me much joy and pleasure.

 

23 December 2008.

Fraggal's BOOT CD torrent file available here

 

09 January 2003.

Have finally found the time to update my cocktail using Fraggal's boot CD. I will write all the details.

First off I downloaded the boot CD from Las Vegas's Purple Mame page. The next process was burning the CD, oh the drama, I made many drink coasters until I got online and spoke to Fraggal himself and he pointed me in the right direction. Using Nero, I went straight to 'File' (bypassing the wizard), and selected 'Burn Image'. I then directed Nero to where I had Fraggal's ISO image, and like magic, it was done.

Off to install on my cabinet, I insert the CD (I previously made sure in the Mainboard BIOS that it would boot from CD), and all is going well. The boot CD has 3 options of installing. I choose option 1 as this did a Fdisk and format as I wanted a fresh install of everything. Next it installed DOS 7 (excellent), then gave me options which when one gets to them, are quite straight forward and easy to follow and understand. Then came the video modes. This was a little more in-depth and prior knowledge of your monitor will certainly help.

Now I know my arcade 15khz monitor is a bitch, she just wouldn't do what I wanted. After many hours and tweaking and fiddling around, I got it nearly there but not right.

Then I rebooted and it didn't boot straight into ArcadeOS (even after several tries). It would get to the following point and go no further:

go bad command

The go.bat is in the ArcadeOS folder and I presume it's there to boot straight into ArcadeOS. I edited my autoexec.bat with the following command at the end of everything else in it:

C:\
CD ARCADEOS
go.bat

Rebooted and went straight into ArcadeOS, (cool, that's what I want).

What happens next nearly lost me my hair. For HOURS and DAYS I tried, tweaked, fiddled, interfered, played with, and mucked around with config files in both ArcadeOS, AdvanceMame, and the Video.exe to get this to work on my hormonal monitor. Absolutely nothing I knew would make it work, (my knowledge or lack of, probably didn't help). I tried a heap of video cards, tried messing with the video.exe in advmame blah blah blah, and still it wouldn't work right. Colours were wrong while using Jpac shift keys, (fraggal did say that this may be a grounding issue and advised me to ground the Jpac to the monitor frame), and some games just wouldn't work.

What did I do? I canned AdvanceMame and ArcadeOS and went for the standard 'mame062b_dos_i686 version and a version of ArcadeOS that was fresh and not from the boot CD

I decided that DOS 7 was staying as this is good, but I just renamed AdvanceMame folder and the ArcadeOS folder to 'old', just in case I want to try again later.

After transferring files and roms, I fired it up and got it all working. One issue that had me stumped for 1 hour was some games would work great and some would come up as garbage. I worked out that if I went into the game config in the ArcadeOS menu, and change were it said 'tweak' to no on the games that weren't working, they suddenly would work.

In all, the Boot CD is a great tool and I look forward to using it on another monitor other than the one I have at the moment. I feel that my experience is rare and would probably NOT happen to other users of it. My monitor REALLY is fussy. Either that or my knowledge stinks, maybe both :o)

Well done Fraggal, Glitch77 and Las Vegas for the work you have done. I appreciate it greatly.
If you use either the Boot CD or ArcadeOS ver 2.5 and you come across the guys online, say thanks to them as I know they would appreciate that.

 

08 December 2002.

With the release of Las Vegas's version of ArcadeOS 2.5, I will be redoing my cabinet with AdvanceMame.62 and the new ArcadeOS 2.5. Will keep this page update as progress continues.

 

04 April 2002.

Got the pics up. It's finally finished for the moment. I'll put some pics of it running shortly.

 

29 Mar 2002.

Finally got the cocktail running a JPAC and Mame going today after many frustrating days/weeks.

The problem I had was my video card. I kept on getting a split, blocky screen that would show three Credit 00 on the screen. I tried out 5 different video cards till I found one that worked. (So much for ATI cards being the be all and end all of cards to use with arcade monitors and Mame). Anyone thinking of using an arcade monitor, I advised either AdvanceMame or try heaps of different Video cards.

The video cards I tried were as follows:

1. ATI Rage IIC 4 Meg
2. ATI Rage IIC 2 Meg
3. ATI Rage XL 8 Meg
4. INTEL i740 8 Meg (this card did work but the refresh rate was poor and it locked up ArcadeOS when exiting)
5. DIAMOND Stealth 540 with Savage 4, 32 Meg(I knew this wouldn't work but I was desperate at this stage)
6. EAGLE TNT2 M64 32 Meg (FINALLY THIS WORKS).

Picked up a cool 20" JAMMA cocktail cabinet in top condition minus monitor, top glass and board. That's fine with me because it was FREE.

I'm going to keep the JAMMA harness in this and use the JPAC as it will double as a MAME beast and a JAMMA platform.

I have left the other wires connected so that the monitor powers up only and it is grounded. (Last thing I need is to die from electric shock). To use a JAMMA PCB I reversed what I have just done

I'm running DOS MAME with the aging ArcadeOS Front-end as I'm running an arcade monitor for this project and I don't want to destroy the monitor by having windows/Video card sending to high a horizontal scanrate to the arcade monitor. ArcadeOS was built with this in mind. For more information on this go to PC to JAMMA / Home of ArcadeOS.

I've been busy cleaning and ripping out all the buttons, joysticks, dead cockroaches etc.

This cocktail was made specifically for interchangeable JAMMA game boards so it never was dedicated for any single game.

I've broken out the digital camera for a few pics for you to look at.

 

Shortly I will be purchasing an arcade monitor to go into the cabinet. In addition I will get either a sheet of perspex or glass cut for the top and some side clips to fasten the it to the cabinet.

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Here we have the Player 1 control panel that was in need of a new coat of paint.
This was done with a quick, light sanding before a thorough wiping clean to prevent dust marks.
Then a quick trip down to Woolies (Woolworth's) for a $4.00 spray can of Gloss black, 3 coats and 24 hours later and presto!. Came up bloody beautiful. (Later I may powder coat them as it is more durable and long lasting).

 

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Next the buttons and joystick got a once over to remove dirt and crap that had built up over the years. Check the colour of the rag I used, it was white.

(Player 2 joystick, [not shown], it's still being worked on)

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Here's the guts of a button for anyone interested. What's not shown, is the microswitch that goes on the end.

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I was wondering what condition the joysticks were in. A little surface rust as well as wear, but nothing major wrong with it. I've since swapped player 1 joystick with player 2 and vice versa.

(Player 1 Joystick)

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I ripped it apart to check inside and found just how solid, strong and robust these joysticks are. Check out how thick the metal casing is. These things are built to withstand teenager and arcade abuse. I have no qualms about how much punishment I give joysticks now.

After some TLC, all the buttons and joystick scrubbed up well.

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I have now got hold of an 20" Kortek monitor to go into the cocktail. The monitor has mild screen burn (in it's previous life, it was a poker machine). When a game is running, one struggles to see the burn.

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I got the legs of the cocktail powder coated satin black and they came up nice.

I hacked apart some JBL monitor speakers I won off Ebay for $12.50 Aus, and screwed them above the existing Mono Jamma speaker. The other speaker is lying in the coin box.

The beauty of the SB16 is that it has an onboard amp so these are powered directly by the sound card without any external power.

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The PC proved a minor hassle but I worked it out.

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The PC is shoved down the left side of the cocktail with the PSU on the bottom, followed by the mainboard suspended with nails and all the wires and Jpac shoved in about it. (a bit of a mess but an organised one).

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Some finished pics