I'm glad that I have skilled players as my Arcade Machines beta testers (here playing Pac-Mania on the vertical monitor and Altered Beast on the Horizontal Monitor). If they don't complain... it's working! :-)
I've been asking a few questions about my first SCART TV cabinet (the one on the right) to the experts in BYOAC, namely to Calamity (the CRT Emu Driver creator). The thread with my questions and Calamity's answers can be found at http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,133668.0.html. Thanks to Calamity I have the perfect setup now, all classic arcade games look more authentic... never been better! I'm going to close the TV's Geometry + MAME Resolutions task. The TV is one of the last built CRT's, and because of that is very limited for Arcade Gaming... but now is fine for my objectives.
Regarding the 2nd Cabinet (I'm going for a Bartop!), I've been developing my wood / carpenter skills :-). A few days ago I've sawed and polished the wood that I got from my old computer's desk. I still need to cut some more wood and assemble everything. Here is the Sketchup's model, the original wood, and some final work.
About the technical part, I did my 1st prototype with an old Pentium 4, 1.5GHz with 378 MB of RAM... but I managed to put my other CPU working (a little bit younger), an AMD Sempron 3200+ with 2GB of RAM. It's already running and playing. As disks, I'm using two Compact Flash (with IDE-Compact Flash adapters), 2GB CF for the Operating System and 16GB CF for MAME, ROMs and Maximus Arcade. The operating system is MicroXP (search for the torrent), very light XP that uses only 200MB of disk space, with only the needed processes / threads running. Here are a couple of pictures of the 1st prototype (already with the Compact Flash Disks).
I'm using Ultimarc's Arcade VGA 2 (AGP) as the GPU (check this baby on the next picture), with CRT Emu Driver (32 bit version), much better than the original Arcade VGA driver (I can get more low resolutions with it).
It's an ATI Radeon 9200 with 128MB RAM, with an hacked firmware for outputting 15KHz (Arcade Monitor or SCART TV frequency). I got it for 40€, about 2 years ago, on an Ultimarc's stock-off. Now, you can only buy the PCI-e version (about 80€). The main advantage of this card is seeing the BIOS and Operating System boots on the SCART TV. Other more powerful ATI Cards (like the Radeon HD 4250 I use on the other cabinet) will work with CRT Emu Driver or Soft15Khz (Great piece of software developed by SailorSat).
Cheers!
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