This, and a very cross Legoman with an ultimatum, to get some stuff done on the next phase of the Mame cabinet, or else. I began to inquire or else what, and was subsequently threatened with a knife.
Beginning to feel the gravity of the situation, I enlisted the aid of the Software Engineer, who regrettably has the least fun pseudonym of any of my usual cohorts. After deeming the first prospective box too archaic (read: coal-burning) to be used reliably even with a new HDD, we cannibalized the recently unemployed box which it turns out uses IDE anyways. My consultant then began to unleash a brand of Technologic far and beyond my own software comprehension, flying through screen after screen of terminal text while I merely sat idly by and chatted up Mojo about the bailouts.
(Btw, Mojo thinks the automakers should go suck a dick.)
Casual recollection aside, Josh (aka the Software Engineer) installed Ubuntu Linux on the new drive, grabbed a bunch of Mame and frontend apps (eventually AdvanceMame and AdvanceMenu), as well as a few items to help us map the controls. We snagged my rom collection from the old drive and dragged it over as well. We then relocated the machine to the basement. Ooh, and then we had Angelico's!
By the end of Sunday, we were here:
The Debugging stage. Yes, we have most of the pieces working together properly. The arcade controls are running through the I-Pac, into the computer, which is outputting through the transcoder to a CRT we happened to have already, and then throughputting to the LCD you see next to the control panel. And, yes, you can play games on it, which we did solely for debugging purposes. Player 3's and Player 4's fourth button isn't functioning, so I'm going to borrow a multimeter to check out those terminals. We had to make sure we switched the joysticks from four way to eight way for proper fighter operation as well.
We've still got some control issues to resolve, a CRT to procure, and a cabinet to build, but we are definitely past the proof of concept stage.
How you like me now, bitches?
4 comments:
"Software Engineer?" You couldn't do better? ;)
Btw I'm going to play with configs for advancemenu here, maybe I'll come up with something easier on the eyes and USB-stick it over.
Yeah, you're going to have to give me a bit of crash course on Ubuntu. I was going to dig around and see if I needed to move files around for those inoperative roms, but got a little lost in the directories... ^.^;
And yeah, I occasionally refer to the cohorts by profession: Software Engineer, Publisher, Package Specialist, Sign Putter Upper, etc. I think it is in vain hope that someone refers to me as "the Technical Director"...
What about "Technically the Dictator?" ;)
I'll for sure show you around the OS. It's simple enough, just need to point out what's where and clean up the desktop some. I think we should change the wallpaper to a big "LOADING" thing, just to confuse people less as the games switch in and out.
Oh yeah, in case anyone is still following up, I have all of 3P and 4P's buttons working. I had originally skipped 3PSW3 and 4PSW3 so that the numeration of the arrangement matched the 1P and 2P configuration. I don't think the I-Pac liked me skipping around input terminals, though. Rewired, repatched. Let's rock.
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