gryhnd

But will require a 12V power supply of sufficient nut to drive the amp(s). I actually went this route in my HT, reusing some old car amps to drive my transducers. If the amp isn't a power hog, you may get away with being able to use an extra PC power supply as I did with a 16w+16w amp. However the other one is a 4x60w, and I used a regulated 12V 25amp switching power supply. You can find them on eBay for around $25-$30.

Gosh darn whipper-snapper I turn 42 Friday...and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

It's Christmas! Ok, well, my birthday is next week, so "It's my birthday!". All the goodies from Groovey Game Gear arrived today. Quite exciting! I left everything wrapped but couldn't resist taking out the Turbo Twist. Wow! What a nice piece of equipment. The X-Arcade trackball arrived last week. Unfortunately the ball itself had a deep scratch in it, but Xgaming sent out a replacement right away, and that is supposed to arrive today too. So I guess I'll have to start making some time to get out to the the shop to begin the cocktail cab. The weather is finally starting to warm up here in N.E....well occasionally anyway.

Ha! Anyone trying to purchase a decent arcade joystick now days (like this MadCatz TE) will have a tough time landing one, mainly due to the Street Fighter 4 release, unless you're one of these handy gamers. Over at TechEBlog

Thanks everyone. I went with GGG's GP-Wiz40 MAX USB today. It was really a toss up still b/w GP-Wiz and the iPac, but Groovy Game Gear had some other items I couldn't due without (like the TurboTwist 2 spinner and the NovaGemCDR buttons), so I combined everything in to one order. Plus RandyT over there got back to me the same day I sent a question in...can't beat that kind of service. So soon I'll have most of the bits and pieces together and should be able to start building the cocktail unit in the near future. BTW, the X-ARCADE TRACKBALL is currently 1/2 price ($49.95), which $10 cheaper than their "Trackball Assembly" DIY unit (and you get more buttons to boot). I am going to gut it and put everything in my own CP. If you've been looking for a t.b. for your cab, this might be the time. No connection, just a happy Tankstick customer.

When I'm coding, I frequently refer to it as the "Mind Warping" stage.

Ack!

My upright cab uses an X-Arcade Tankstick, mostly because I had a time limit and didn't have the luxury of researching all my joystick, button, trackball and encoder options. However for the future cocktail cab, I'll be rolling my own. I've heard great things about both the iPac and GP-Wiz encoder products and have decided it will be one of the two. However I wanted to solicit opinions from the peanut gallery first before deciding. Please keep any rivalry civil, and more pointedly: to the facts as you know them. Thanks in advance gang! If this is too O.T. for the Gx forum, please spank me Tom and go ahead and delete

Correct. Thanks for continuing to ponder this Tempest. I took a look at some of the source file drivers, and grepped for "cabinet"...but in the short amount of time I took to look it over, there didn't seem to be much consistency to the dip switch texts. Anyhow, I'm still months away from this cab coming to fruition. Once it's playable I'll turn the slave labor on to it

I had thought about that too originally. If there was some way to simple position yourself with the menu in the item that says "Cabinet" (should it exist), and then move the options until "cocktail" was detected, you'd be golden. Executing this though, is beyond my current skill set. Anyway, it seems to me the text is the same when used (it comes out of MAME itself I believe), but the position within the menu, and how many menu items there are, varies with each game.

Thanks for the effort, I appreciate it!

It's an option in either setup or the advanced config...can't remember which. "Show games only" or something to that affect.

Wow? Really? That'd be awesome, thanks! If it is going to be anything more than a few moments of your time, please do not trouble yourself. I can always use slave labor: aka my 9 year old My current CFGs are pretty much just me 1 by 1 flipping the virtual DIP So they are sacrificial. I have 842 ROMs in my folder...some are clones. Let me know how I can help.

Thanks BK, but that's for screen rotation, which I have all set. The DIP switch setting controls (typically) how the game operates. If it is set to "cocktail" then when it is player 2's turn, the game flips the screen automatically. I'll give it a shot but I don't think that'll do the trick.

I've got Gx and MAME all nicely working in a vertical format for my upcoming cocktail cabinet. I've trimmed my thousands of ROMs down to several hundred vertical only, using a script I found somewhere. However the one thing I can't seem to figure out is if there is a way (command line, 3rd party app, etc) that can automatically search/set the DIP Switch settings for each ROM, and if the "Cabinet" entry exists, flip it from the default of "Upright" to "Cocktail". Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

If strictly MAME, you can get away with much less. My upright runs a 3.0 P4 with HT, a 6000 series nVidia graphics card and 2GB RAM...and it does awesome. My kid also runs his PC games on there with no problems and some of them have fairly high system requirements. On the opposite end of the scale, I'm working on a cocktail cab right now, and it's running on an old PIII 500 laptop I recycled. For MAME games it works just fine (although I do have some issues with the old fashioned embedded Neomagic graphics chip), but I have zero expectations for it to do anything else down the line. So essentially "where do you want to go today?"

Not theme related...they are generic config. options. All those things you want to turn off are options you can switch in the Setup and/or advanced Config programs. WRT Update, etc...you have to turn them back on when you need them, then turn them off again...also in the setup/advanced config proggies.

It's the molecular biologist in me coming out. Basically an intron is a bit of DNA that never gets translated (used). IOW a non-coding section. Just like the AmbienceFile line in the INI never gets used but, yet, there it is remains

Because it is a system level "switch". You mentioned above that your probably changed OSes. If you did, the reg is still back with the original OS and/or computer, it is not contained within the GameEx directory itself.

Had to chuckle this morning. I was editing GameEx.ini directly when I came across a latent entry for the ambiance file. Obviously at some point Tom had made a spelling error (AmbienceFile vs AmbianceFile), but the old one remained and has carried on...including his test file AmbienceFile=L:\-DATA-\-MP3-\4 Non Blondes\4 Non Blondes - What's Up.mp3 Let's call it an intron

Unlike my XP-Pro upright cab, which when I push "power" during a MAME game will properly shutdown, I wasn't seeing this for some reason under the W2K I'm working on for a cocktail cab. I'd hit the button and wait. And wait. If I exited (ESC) MAME it would then shut down immediately. The button otherwise functions as intended under everything else. A couple of registry tweaks helped solve this for me, and apparently are applicable to Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista. See here for the specifics. I only used the options under "Reduce the wait time for user processes and applications to be killed" and "Automatically end, terminate and kill user processes or tasks on shutdown or logoff". All is well now

Thanks Tempest, Older-ish 9.29, for reasons described over here. It's not a show stopper if that's the case, I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something. I was thinking of you the other day. I came across someone on C.L. selling a Tempest game here in S.E. Mass...or it might have been RI. Anyway, it disappeared pretty quickly.

So I'm inferring by omission that there is no setting in GameEx I overlooked? That's all I'm really trying to find out firstly, then move on from there

Thanks E.T., however I'm resistant to adding things on to the computer which is quite old and slim on horsepower and memory. I was hoping I had just missed a switch somewhere in Gx, but if not I'll end up disabling mouse support.

I've poked around for an answer, but I can't figure out where (or if) there's a setting so that when Gameex is in vertical mode (90 degrees rotation) that the mouse's orientation (axes) also changes. The keyboard arrows navigate correctly, but the mouse (aka trackball) remains in the standard horizontal mode. Edit: mame32 takes care of this for the game itself...I'm just talking about navigating through Gx