Once I was satisfied that the hardware was all basically working the way I wanted it to, I decided to take a break from construction and delve into the software.  My goal was to get the software to work with my jury-rigged control panel and prove to myself that I could create a machine which doesn’t take a computer-literate person to operate, and can be controlled without a keyboard/mouse.

First, I downloaded the latest emulator from www.mamedev.org – seemed like an obvious thing to do.  This worked, but had some issues with being controlled exclusively from the control panel.  I still had to keep hitting the ESC key on the keyboard, and that just wouldn’t do.

So, I went to the support section on www.xgaming.com and they have an article on there entitled “Configuring MAME for X-Arcade use – The Easy Way”.  Now that sounded good!  They recommend using a slightly different version of the emulator called “Mame Plus!” – no problem, I downloaded and installed it and it worked just fine, following their simple directions.  I did of course have to put some ROMS into the mame/roms directory (more about this later).

The nice thing about using this version, and the associated control files that come with it, is it’s set up nicely for the joystick/button setup that I have (same layout as the xarcade device).  When you run a game, it comes up with a warning screen telling you that you need to own the ROM files because of copyright issues.  Then, it makes you type OK on the keyboard to proceed.  With this emulator version & associated control files though, you also have the option of moving player 1 joystick left then right (it says on the screen to do this) instead of using the keyboard.

Another important thing is exiting the game.  To do this, you hit the ESC key.  Fortunately, with this software setup you can hold the “2 player start” button and push the right pinball flipper simultaneously to exit also.  Voilla!  Keyboard has now been rendered totally unnecessary for game play.  I decided that was an odd key combination, and I changed mine so that you press “1 player start” and “2 player start” simultaneously to exit.  I may decide that’s a bad idea at some point, but it seems good for now (besides, if you read the bit about the wiring harness, you might remember that my right hand fllipper button is not hooked up because the wire is too short, and I was too lazy to extend it).  I also went into the mame.ini file and manually disabled the game info screen that comes up when you first launch a game (after you say OK to the ROM police).  To do that, I changed “skip_gameinfo 0” to “skip_gameinfo 1”.

Here’s a useful article which lists all the options in the mame.ini file, and what they do: CLICK HERE

If you really want to use the latest version, instead of the “Mame Plus!” version from xgaming, then edit the mame.ini file and in the “core input options” section, make sure you have “ctrlr xarcade” in there.  That should do all the control tweaking for you.

While the mame/mame+ user interface (UI) is workable, it’s not very pretty, and not very kid-friendly (or grandma friendly).  So, I looked around for other front-end programs.  There are quite a lot of them out there.  The one I decided to download and try was Hyperspin.  I’m not totally crazy about this front-end, but it does give me the ability to prevent users from bailing out and ending up with a windows desktop.  Also, it makes the game selection process more game-like than the mame UI.  I learned quite a bit about managing it and getting the menu selection pared down to a usable list (instead of 6000+ games in alphabetical order).  I’ll share that stuff later on.  For now, I’m satisfied that I can make this thing turnkey and it’s back to the hardware!

Next up: Extending the wire harness

The next step was to wire the panel.

Here’s a link to the button/joystick kit I used: CLICK HERE
Here’s a link to the keyboard encoder: CLICK HERE

The XARCADE keyboard encoder came with a wiring harness, so it should be fairly simple, right?  The wires are labeled next to the small connector which plugs into the circuit board, and also they are labeled on the ends where they push on to the micro switches.  Each switch has 2 wires which go to the “COM” (common) and “NO” (normally open) connectors.  The “NC” (normally closed) lug is not used on any of the switches.  It doesn’t matter which wire you connect to COM and NO, as switches don’t have polarity.  It’s not physically possible to hook all the wires up as-is because of the way they are joined together with the labels.  They use common wires with multiple connectors on them, and all the commons are the same, so I took the labels off the switch end of the wires, and re-applied them just to the non-common wires, like this: 

This enabled me to attach the wires to the switches easily, and then I took the common wires and wired them in whatever order was convenient.  For the joysticks, this meant running the common in a circle from one switch to the other until all 4 were connected.  You can zoom in on these pictures by clicking on them:

I didn’t try very hard to route the wires neatly, as I know I’m going to have to take all this off again in order to fill the holes in the panel and I’ll probably cover it with laminate or something.  What I did discover is that the wiring harness is really short!  This was a bit of a surprise as this is a small enclosure, so the buttons & joysticks are closer together than you’d probably want for a 2 player stand-up system.  I asked the manufacturer if they sold longer harnesses or harness extensions and was told that no, they don’t.  So, I’m going to have to cut into the harnesses and extend the wires myself – a mind-numbing task which I will probably not enjoy much.  For now, though, I wanted to find out if it’d work.  You know, proof-of-concept (aka: instant gratification)

I brought the case inside the house (it’s winter and my garage has no heat), and set it up on my desk.  To the right you can see the diminutive Dell Optiplex I’m using as the CPU, and it’s power supply on the desk next to it.  I set a 15” flat screen monitor inside the box to get an idea for sizing and how it will all work.  They keyboard/mouse will not be present when the unit is completed, but they are pretty important for development.

If you look down into the enclosure, you’ll see the keyboard enclosure PC board right behind the control panel.  Unfortunately, that’s where the monitor bezel needs to go.  You can see where the bezel slides in vertically by the guides on the sides.  The two white switches to the left of the PC card are the “1 player” and “2 player” start buttons.  I haven’t decided where I’ll put those, but I suspect to the right of the monitor.

I wired the right hand joystick/button cluster as “Player 1” as I figured that would be most comfortable for right-handed people like me.  For two-player mode, “Player 2” is on the left, and you’ll have to be bumping shoulders.  After fiddling with this for a while, I’m not convinced that the right hand cluster is most comfortable as I’d thought for single player use.  I’ll wait until I’ve got the monitor mounted properly to make that decision as the monitor will not be in the center of the box as it is now, it’ll probably be to the left (that was the original configuration of the box, and it seems like an OK one, though I suppose I could have the monitor more towards the right hand side.  Trail and error!)

Clearly, I’m going to have to extend the harness – Grr!

On the bright side, there seems to be plenty of room in the enclosure for the CPU and for the monitor.  I have a few of these flat-screen monitors I picked up surplus a couple of years ago, so my plan is to take one apart and mount the LCD to the front bezel.  I might have to re-make the bezel to fit the monitor screen, I haven’t measured that yet as I don’t know what the LCD panel is going to look like once I take it out of it’s aging yellowed plastic case.  Also, the power supplies attached to the walls of the enclosure are going to go away – I don’t need them.

I plugged the keyboard into the PC board, and plugged the wire from that board into the back of the Dell.  When I powered it up, everything worked fine and the system booted normally.  I’d installed a fresh copy of Windows XP and had installed all the Microsoft patches already.  I fired up Notepad and pressed each button in turn to make sure it “typed” the correct key.  All was fine except the right “flipper” button on the front – the wiring harness wouldn’t reach that, so I don’t have it hooked up.  Also, 2 of the switches on the joysticks needed a little adjustment to make them “release” properly when you let go of the joystick and it springs back to the center position.  To accomplish this, I just bent the trigger bars on the micro switches a bit with needle nose pliers.  Xgaming has a special “tester” program, but I didn’t bother to download it, as Notepad was quite sufficient to let me see what was going on.  The only keys that are difficult to test are the ones that generate Shift, Ctl and Alt.

I left the “mode” switch in “mode 1” (switch all the way at one end, nearest the yellow wire – finding that gem of info in the documentation took a while, and the switch is not labeled).  Mode 1 is the “factory” programming layout.  I don’t have any need to program it differently, so that works fine for me.

Next up: Software!