PinKadia! The Ultimate virtual Pinball / Arcade / PC combo cabinet!

[stigzler]

Still waiting to see Ikaruga played on that bad boy...

[tthurman]

No doubt TerryRed has a picture perfect pincab/arcade setup, at least IMO.

What you mention about the emu's has always been a strong reason I've stayed away.  bliss-box looks to have finally become available, and all things considered it looks like a pretty reasonable price for admission.  In all honesty, I haven't done much reading on this in recent months/year, but it has always looked promising to me.

[TerryRed]

21 hours ago, RIP-Felix said:

21 hours ago, RIP-Felix said:

Have you thought about what you're going to do for emulators? IMO these are best played with their original controllers. So in my cab I have a bin of old controllers and their respective adapters underneath. It's becoming a rats nest of wires and USB cables which are never recognized with the same input mappings, so I have to reassign controls almost every time I want to play. I was thinking of making a custom panel with controller ports facing outward with all the USB facing inward and connecting to the same port so they can keep their button assignments in the various emulators.

I was a little skeptical of having arcade controls on the pincade, but I have to say the results look great. Nice cab!

Consoles emulators are a far off project for the pincab right now.

On my 4K TV, (which my gaming PC is connected to) for the most part I have always just used an Xbox One gamepad for most of the older consoles (it covers most controls very well), except for the Wii which I have working perfectly with the original controllers (and in 4K too).

AS for having to re-assaign controls.... are your controllers always connected? You could use a program like Pinnacle Gaming Profile (what I use) to automatically re-map controls when a specific emulator is launched. Even if I disconnect / reconnect controllers it works quite well.

If controller IDs are the issue and you MUST unplug controllers to allow others to work correctly, you could try getting one of the USB HUBS with the on / off switch for each port. I made my own custom version for my simpit, so I wouldn't have to uplug my flight stick or steering wheel. I just turn on / off each at the throw of a switch on a panel which is in front of my flight stick.

 

21 hours ago, stigzler said:

Still waiting to see Ikaruga played on that bad boy...

It will come....those vertical shooters look great on here.

 

I'm in the middle of doing MAME marquees. I have to make custom marquees for my setup. I wanted the vertical screen to have as much of the game as possible with minimal bezel coverage. This means no mamelayplus for vertical games (even though it looks cool) because I hate how small the vertical games are using that.  I'm also not going to create "Lay" files for EVERY game.

I also don't like that the horizontal games are a lot smaller on the backglass screen compared to the playfield screen, even though you have a lot of unused space above and below it. Still not sure which screen I'll use...

I had created over 1000 custom images that show both the MAME logo on the top part of the middle screen, and the game's marquee on the bottom half (or the other way around depending on marquee size). This would work for horizontal on either the top screen or the bottom screen. It looked great. I had to use a combination of creative use of Pinball X and OBS to do this....and yes it was ALL done manually!

 

However I didn't like having to squish or stretch the various different sized marquees that MAME has....some of them are an entire 16x9 screen size! I didn't like how small they were compared to how big they could be. I also didn't know what to do with the top screen while playing vertical games.

So I decided that I'm going to have the marquees on the top screen with a bezel-type image around it that will accommodate each size of every bezel. It looks really cool having these marquee images displayed in a large size while browsing and while playing! There aren't marquees for every game, so I will have to eventually figure out what to do with the other games.

I will post pics / videos when I'm done.....there are A LOT of files!

 

 

[RIP-Felix]

On 3/28/2016 at 9:19 AM, TerryRed said:

...AS for having to re-assaign controls.... are your controllers always connected? You could use a program like Pinnacle Gaming Profile (what I use) to automatically re-map controls when a specific emulator is launched. Even if I disconnect / reconnect controllers it works quite well.

If controller IDs are the issue and you MUST unplug controllers to allow others to work correctly, you could try getting one of the USB HUBS with the on / off switch for each port. I made my own custom version for my simpit, so I wouldn't have to uplug my flight stick or steering wheel. I just turn on / off each at the throw of a switch on a panel which is in front of my flight stick.

Yeah, it's kinda been a job I've put off now for awhile (Years). I don't know if there is a way to link a specific controller adapter to a USB ID Profile that I could just setup once and have load every time it is recognized by the computer, regardless of the port it's inserted in, but that would be ideal. I figured that I could just label my ports and USB cables so I know where to plug them back in. That way when I set everything up (EVERYTHING) the button assignments in the emulators will all match up again. I don't know how the computer issues a new ID, or if it would load a default controller HID device destroying all my hopes and dreams or what, but It should work. Hopefully, if I just leave everything plugged in It will work the same as before. Thus the Idea of making a panel with all the controller ports facing outward, and the USBs connected to a HUB or directly to the labeled USB ports on the I/O panel. This way I can have all the old controllers in a bin and just plug in the one I want before starting that system.

Thanks for the suggestion about Pinnacle Gaming Profile, I'll look into it.

I feel your pain about *.lay files. My cab is a vertical setup and I had to do a lot of the work myself to get things to display right. From GameEX theme to custom *.lay file for choice games. I use mr do's mame layout generator to create the correct template and add my own artwork as needed. You have to make a picture in Paint.net or photoshop and save it as the bezel.png in the artwork zip file. Then you replace the layout with the one this generates. It's fairly quick, once you make the bezel.png. I did this for my favorite games and it looks awesome. I've attached some pics to give you an idea of what's possible with the vertscreen display so you don't rule it out in favor of the back screen too quickly. You could use my theme in gameex on your vertscreen and launch the game to the back screen, not sure how but I'm sure it can be done. That would look way cool. Honestly, I've never seen my theme on anyone elses cab before. I'll bet it'd be surreal to see our labors of love running together..

That pincab looks awesome BTW, the head tracking to change viewing angle for 3D is pure Genius. They just need to be able to track video of your noggin, maybe using facial recognition software to calculate position and distance from the spacing of your eyes, instead of IR LEDs. That way you don't need a K'nex Hacked hat, or any other peripherals. My camera can recognize faces, how hard is it to track eyes instead. You would just need to create a calibrated user, which would be as simple as standing still for a second or two. Please someone figure this out.

If I had the space I would like to make a similarly designed pincab. I like the arcade controls, making it very versatile. Thanks man, you make me drool...your cab I mean...you know what I mean.

[TerryRed]

2 hours ago, RIP-Felix said:

Yeah, it's kinda been a job I've put off now for awhile (Years). I don't know if there is a way to link a specific controller adapter to a USB ID Profile that I could just setup once and have load every time it is recognized by the computer, regardless of the port it's inserted in, but that would be ideal. I figured that I could just label my ports and USB cables so I know where to plug them back in. That way when I set everything up (EVERYTHING) the button assignments in the emulators will all match up again. I don't know how the computer issues a new ID, or if it would load a default controller HID device destroying all my hopes and dreams or what, but It should work. Hopefully, if I just leave everything plugged in It will work the same as before. Thus the Idea of making a panel with all the controller ports facing outward, and the USBs connected to a HUB or directly to the labeled USB ports on the I/O panel. This way I can have all the old controllers in a bin and just plug in the one I want before starting that system.

Thanks for the suggestion about Pinnacle Gaming Profile, I'll look into it.

I feel your pain about *.lay files. My cab is a vertical setup and I had to do a lot of the work myself to get things to display right. From GameEX theme to custom *.lay file for choice games. I use mr do's mame layout generator to create the correct template and add my own artwork as needed. You have to make a picture in Paint.net or photoshop and save it as the bezel.png in the artwork zip file. Then you replace the layout with the one this generates. It's fairly quick, once you make the bezel.png. I did this for my favorite games and it looks awesome. I've attached some pics to give you an idea of what's possible with the vertscreen display so you don't rule it out in favor of the back screen too quickly. You could use my theme in gameex on your vertscreen and launch the game to the back screen, not sure how but I'm sure it can be done. That would look way cool. Honestly, I've never seen my theme on anyone elses cab before. I'll bet it'd be surreal to see our labors of love running together..

That pincab looks awesome BTW, the head tracking to change viewing angle for 3D is pure Genius. They just need to be able to track video of your noggin, maybe using facial recognition software to calculate position and distance from the spacing of your eyes, instead of IR LEDs. That way you don't need a K'nex Hacked hat, or any other peripherals. My camera can recognize faces, how hard is it to track eyes instead. You would just need to create a calibrated user, which would be as simple as standing still for a second or two. Please someone figure this out.

If I had the space I would like to make a similarly designed pincab. I like the arcade controls, making it very versatile. Thanks man, you make me drool...your cab I mean...you know what I mean.

My personal experience is, that with most devices, they will get their ID / order assigned however windows orders them....but it does tend to be the same each time (if plugged into the same USB port, etc), but you can't make it in the order YOU want. You have to take it as it comes. As long as your console controller doesn't require any analogue function, you can have something like Pinnacle Game Profiler (maybe xpadder) assign your controls to keyboard equivalents for a specific program on the fly (it will do this on its own as long as your controllers have a unique "name"). This is how my Pincab handles my exit emulator / keys as well as killing specific running tasks (via BAT files) that is assigned to my exit button my gamepad controller. It automatically changes on a per-game basis. 

 

I downloaded all of Mr Dos artwork, etc, and I was considering doing something like what you have on a per game basis. The thing is, that if I put the marquee, etc all on the vertical screen then there's nothing left for me to display on my two other screens. lol.

So for now, I'm using Rocket Launcher and it's excellent bezel features to use a generic bezel for EVERY game automatically with a generic (or random) background. This way I don't have to make ANY lay files to have a standard bezeled and background layout (for EVERY game), and I can still use MAMEs artwork (or my own easily via Rocket Launcher) on a per game basis as needed.

Rocket Launcher bezels (made by the community) look excellent with its bezel / backgrounds on a horizontal screen. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a community that does the same kind of artwork for vertical screens. I think I will end up having a Pinball X menu that will give me the choice to launch MAME either by the backglass screen or the playfield as well. (easy to do)  Then I will have all the vertical games only launch on the playfield. As least I can do all of the above easy enough, its just a matter of getting something on each screen when playing that I like.

At least with Pinball X, the "marquee" pics that I'm making will always be displayed on the backglass screen (or middle screen maybe when playing on the backglass screen). Making the marquee pics is tricky but goes fairly quickly....its just naming to match the rom file that takes so long since there are thousands of them! Its going quicker than one would think... just watching a lot of Netflix on the left of the screen while making the pics on the right of the screen...

 

As for the head tracking with no leds.... that's actually what "facetrack-no ir" was made for...and it does work, but no where near as good as using ir leds or using kinex v2 for xb1.  It is pretty cool that some of these pinball sims are working on the new VR headsets.... check this out:

 

[RIP-Felix]

Well then, that makes me very excited indeed! I just put together a PC build with the Rift in mind (i7-4790, GTX 970, 8GB RAM). I saw there was a wait list and had trouble with my GTX 970 fan, so I RMA'd it figuring that prices will drop a bit when I can actually purchase a RIFT. So I'm holding out running on the integrated Graphics ATM. My X-Arcade Tankstick CP has flipper controls, so I guess I can just get that X-Box controller software shown in the video to trick windows into using keyboard commands as x-Box inputs so I can us it. No need for a pincab if the RIFT can display VP tables  I wonder if this will be awhile or if someone has it figured out already. The table you showed in the video showing head tracking would likely be simple to hack for the RIFT. Sick! I'm excited for this future. Bring on the VR headsets of Caprica (Obscure Science Fiction reference, I know)!

[TerryRed]

Well here we go. I got MAME up and running in PinKadia!

I have it setup to have Pinball X show the marquees on the backglass screen. (which I had to make into 16x9 pictures, over 2700 of them!)

I captured videos of gameplay using OBS. I liked Tom's MAME videos from the GameEx FTP, but Pinball X makes them stretch and fill the whole screen with the wrong aspect ratio. I do use them for the games I haven't video captured yet.

The vertical games are perfect for the playfield screen. Horizontal games could be played on the backglass screen, but they would be alot smaller compared to the playfield screen, and I would need to have my head looking upward all the time to play.

My main priority was to have the game screen as large as possible with HLSL effects (no screen curve, or glow, etc). With the game this big (42 inch TV for the playfield screen) HLSL really is needed to make the game not look blocky and yuck! I also wanted no bezel obstruction of the game screen.

I use Rocket Launcher to manage the bezels and backgrounds. This allows me to use a default bezel / background for ALL games, and I can have it easily change to a random / specific one or use MAME's artwork. Its easy to just add another background this way, and I don't need to deal with "lay" files!  

If the original arcade or a custom bezel works well to cover the leftover unused screen area, I'll use it. Otherwise I use a chrome / metal hexagon bezel that I made to match the style of my Pincab (it looks much better in person than it does in the videos!).

I made several different ones to better fit the different sized marquees as well. I used Pinball X to have my backglass screen act as a DMD screen sized the same as the marquee, and centered. Then I had windows use the "blank" metal hexagon / chrome trim picture as a wallpaper background picture. When I ran Pinball X this way it displays the marquee OVERTOP of the metal hexagon picture. I used OBS to capture the entire backglass screen with the new 16x9 marquee as a small video. (I would hit flipper button, then "record" over and over and over again) Then I just played all the recorded videos back to back, and saved each as a picture with the name of the MAME rom file to match. It sounds complicated, but it was the easiest way to do this. I got over 2700 done! I know...,. I'm crazy.

The reason I had to use OBS is because I couldn't find a program to "screen capture" the backglass screen (acting as the dmd screen) properly. They either require the "screen to be captured" to be the primary screen (which messes up Pinball X), or they will only capture the DMD portion of the DMD screen in Pinball X. I needed the entire screen with the marquee AND background....and OBS only does video capture.

I have over 2700 MAME games setup though.... I'm not crazy enough to make custom backgrounds or bezels for that many games! 

 

Here is a video showing around 80 MAME games. It shows a mix of vertical and horizontal games with and without the arcade bezels.

 

[tthurman]

Nice detailed post that is sure to save others lots of trial an error.  

As usual, this looks completely awesome!  

[TerryRed]

Well, now it is time for more upgrades.... as a result this is what happens in the middle of a project upgrade... total mess everywhere which makes my wife sooooo happy!

 

I always wanted to add in a plunger and a big LAUNCH button.  Can't easily find either in Canada, and buying from the US is costly with our crappy CDN dollar and costly shipping.

So, I found a place in Ottawa that does repairs and sells parts called Pinball Medics.   

https://pinballmedics.ca/

Since I was taking my daughter to Ottawa Comi-Con, I was able to stop by his place and buy what I needed from him. He had everything except for the mounting plate for the plunger, which I didn't need anyway.  He's a great guy and had a fantastic Pinball collection which I sadly didn't have time to check out....

Here's a video demonstration of my plunger setup:

 

Hopefully I can maybe make a couple of custom tilt-bobs to work as a digital nudge type of setup. Then, I'm off to update the control panel with a different button layout, a third 4-way joystick, and all three joysticks will have BAT tops instead of BALL tops.

After all this is done, its just a waiting game for all my parts to arrive from China, so I can install feedback via 10 solenoids. I'll also be installing led strip lighting to act as 5 rgb flashers, addressable led strip lighting / matrix for animation, white strobes, and red / blue beacons (LED strobe versions).  Lots of work to do!

[stigzler]

Cool beans. That plunger is a must. 

You also win the prize for the arcade builder who sounds the most like Stevo out of Jackass

[TerryRed]

As long as I don't get injured like he does, while doing my projects..... I'm good with that.

[TerryRed]

While waiting for my parts to arrive from China for feedback (solenoids, lighting, etc), I figured I would get some other upgrades done to the cabinet, now that the plunger is working.

After using the cabinet for a while, I really wanted to have a dedicated 4-way joystick for alot of the classic arcade games that really do need it. (Pac-man, Q-bert, Dig-Dug, and many more).  I also wasn't really happy with the "ergonomic" button layout. Yah, it was nicer for fighting games, but not for anything else for me personally. Also, in order for me to fit a third joystick on the control panel I would have to rearrange the buttons in order to have enough space. I also didn't like the ball tops, and the LED joysticks don't allow for easily changing the tops without reaching inside the cabinet.

Another thing I wanted was to eventually put in a spinner, but I needed to have a hole pre-drilled for it. So I have two extra buttons above the right joystick that can be swapped out with a spinner later on. I also put in a central "FIRE" button for those pinball games that use it (Star Trek, AC/DC, Alien Legacy, etc).  I also labelled every button with transparent labels from a cheap label maker. It worked surprisingly well, and you can't see the label unless you look real close at the buttons.

I decided to use a spare XBOX 360 gamepad (instead of the Logitech gamepad) for player one and the pinball controls. The main reason was that I wanted to have force-feedback outputs from the gamepad to use to create possible feedback options (solenoids, lighting) for Pinball FX2 and The Pinball Arcade in the future.  I also setup this controller so that the x / y potentiometer was completely accessible for the plunger in the cabinet. This gamepad was MUCH easier to wire up as it had only one common ground for all buttons, and the pads were larger and easier to work with.

Here you can see that I now have the entire control panel connected to two old school parallel db-25 cables for player one and player two, with a molex connector for the LED lighting. MUCH nicer than having all wires directly goto the gamepads. Yes, this involved soldering over 125 wires.... but now if I ever need to get access to the control panel or change / replace anything, I just unplug three easy to access cables.  Yes, its alot of work, and I could have used some other solutions instead of gamepads, but that would not have given absolute complete compatibility with ALL PC Games and emulators / pinball games without some hassles. I will NEVER have any problems with any game running properly on this cabinet using this.

Here you can see the extra trim I put around the side and front buttons. I found that the LED lighting was too bright at 12V for the LED buttons on the arcade panel, so I used 5V instead. Combined with the non-lit BAT tops, I found this to be much nicer on the eyes while playing. My white LEDS for the bottom white buttons have died out, and I didn't have any spares. So I put in similar colour LEDS as the A B X Y buttons to match for now. They look almost the same in person and much nicer as opposed to the picture.

With the undercab and speaker lighting, it makes for quite the colorful display at night time.... can't wait for my addressable led strips!

[tthurman]

Nice work, that's a lot of flowing!  

It's nice to see that you went back to the straight button layout, and prefer it over the ergo method.  I'm not a huge fighting games player, but couldn't help but wonder what I was missing with my conventional button layout.  Initially it wasn't something that ever entered into my mind, but the longer I've been in this hobby combined with so many references to slagcoin layouts, I couldn't help but wonder if I wasn't missing something.

You cab is looking better all the time, can't wait to see what it looks like when you other parts arrive.

 

[TerryRed]

Yah, let's just say that in the 15 years of being a civilian electronics tech, I've done more soldering than I care to remember. (Not a lot of soldering since I've been a tech for the military)

The ergonomic layout (which I did get from slag coin, great site) is nice for a two player situation where two people are really close together. So I figured this would be good to give some space when I had two people playing. Since I'm the only one who is using this thing most of the time, it became a non-issue. The straight layout just works better for classic arcade games.

The 4-way joystick is soooo much nicer. I didn't want to deal with a u360, rotating gates, etc..   This just works all the time, nice and easy.

Now I've been getting CP Wizard to create control panel / button layout pictures for each game in MAME that will show up in the top half of the middle screen. Pinball X will display this pic as my DMD screen image, and will continue to show it when the game is launched. This is soooo nice and looks great and is much easier for people who don't know what the controls are for each game.

I didn't want to have CP Wizard running in the background, so this works perfectly without any hassles. I will post pics when I get it more sorted out.

 

[stigzler]

Love the attention to detail. 

Given it's multi-monitor, just a share of a few apps I've spit and glued together to help with multi-mon controls/image displays:

https://cpwizbiz.codeplex.com/

 

[TerryRed]

1 hour ago, stigzler said:

Love the attention to detail. 

Given it's multi-monitor, just a share of a few apps I've spit and glued together to help with multi-mon controls/image displays:

https://cpwizbiz.codeplex.com/

 

Yah, I didn't see your stuff or CP-Wizard until AFTER I made all of my marquee images. Would have made my that job much easier! At least now I can change things up now if I want alot easier.

Since I use Pinball X for my front-end, it takes care of most of my multi-monitor requirements on its own. I just needed control panel pics to fill in my "4th" display area above the DMD. After seeing that CP-Wizard can export batch pics for each MAME game, I thought that this would be perfect for that space!  I've got it working well.... I just have to get it looking snazzy somehow. Maybe I'll keep it simple for now.... having issues getting dual stick layouts to work...

[stigzler]

Ah yeah - CPWizard is all you need if yer just setting up Mame. CPWizBiz can make working with layouts a bit easier, though - allowing you to batch resize/change attributes + work with images better (preserve aspect etc). I'm suspecting that it's a bit of a steep learning curve though -  415 downloads and not one person using it. Either that or it's knackered.

btw - "4th display"!?

awesome.

[TerryRed]

4 minutes ago, stigzler said:

Ah yeah - CPWizard is all you need if yer just setting up Mame. CPWizBiz can make working with layouts a bit easier, though - allowing you to batch resize/change attributes + work with images better (preserve aspect etc). I'm suspecting that it's a bit of a steep learning curve though -  415 downloads and not one person using it. Either that or it's knackered.

btw - "4th display"!?

awesome.

The "4th display" is the area above the DMD on the third monitor, made to look like a 4th display, even though I only have 3 screens.... which is why I use quotes with "4th display".

If I ever get more systems up and running in this cabinet, then I may look to your stuff as well... keeping it simple for now with so many other bits I still have to install on the hardware side.

I mean, hell.... I just tried out Crossy Roads from the Windows 10 store on the playfield screen, and it looks damn cool, and plays great with a 4-way joystick. I never even thought of trying tablet type games on here, but some of them are perfectly suited for it with the vertical screen. (Don't want to deal with Android emulators if I don't have to)

[TerryRed]

I always try to find new ways to make use of the "4th display" area on my middle screen.

For MAME, I knew there were some cool programs out there that would let you see your control panel layout and other info for each game, either by pausing, etc..

I just wanted a way to show what the controls were for each game in MAME since there are so many different layouts. When someone else is using the cabinet, it would be nice not having to explain to them the controls for each game....but when I found CP-Wizard, I found exactly what I had wanted.

I am basically trying to setup as standard control panel layout for each control type for each game in CP-Wizard. I just made a background pic the size of my middle screen with the MAME logo at the bottom. Then I made the layouts I wanted and saved them as separate layouts.  Then I had CP-Wizard configured to use whatever layout for each control scheme as required.

I didn't need to have CP Wizard running in the background. I just had CP-Wizard do an Export-batch, creating control panel images for each game automatically with the correct naming of the files. These pics work with Pinball X as my DMD screen images for MAME. They display while browsing through each game and stay displayed while playing. Simple and easy to see to see while playing at any time.  I may just use this for PC Games and other emulators too.

Here's some pics of my current layout. Its simple, and probably not final, but works quite well.

 

[stigzler]

That looks great. Showcases headkaze's app spectacularly. That app was written 10 years ago + it's still going strong today! The dude's got some mad skilz,

[TerryRed]

As do you stig!

I've just gotten into the cabinet scene for myself just in the last year, so I've had alot of catching up to do (to see what software is out there,etc) since last fall when I started this cabinet build.

[pezima77]

hello terry,

very nice pincab , great work 

for the nudge (tilt) you can use a pinscape controller KL25Z , it's a very nice card for nudge,ledwiz,interface button and sensor launch ball.

I have too a pincab with control arcade for game pc and schmup...it's a small pincab with 2 screen , style P2K (fronton pinball 2000)

this is the kl25z

http://

http:

 

//

[TerryRed]

6 minutes ago, pezima77 said:

hello terry,

very nice pincab , great work 

for the nudge (tilt) you can use a pinscape controller KL25Z , it's a very nice card for nudge,ledwiz,interface button and sensor launch ball.

I have too a pincab with control arcade for game pc and schmup...it's a small pincab with 2 screen , style P2K (fronton pinball 2000)

http://

 

Sweet pinball / arcade cabinet! Love the central FIRE button panel.

If I didn't have two gamepads on my cabinet, I would have gone with a Pinscape setup for sure!  

For my current cabinet however, the pinscape would be seen as a 3rd gamepad, which would make things a real pain for me. 

 

To be honest though, this cabinet is sooo heavy that you need some good force to move it, and I don't really like the idea of it getting bashed around.  That's why I currently have stuck with my side nudge buttons, for now. We'll see....

[pezima77]

ah ok , i see.

3 minutes ago, TerryRed said:

To be honest though, this cabinet is sooo heavy that you need some good force to move it, and I don't really like the idea of it getting bashed around

with the pinscape you can adjusted the sensibility , just to type or move a little the pincab for nudge it's ok.

sorry for my bad english...

ps: I see your video on the page facebook of russel (slamt1lt)

[TerryRed]

Here's a video showing the new control panel, as well as an update to what parts I have so far for controlled LED lighting and feedback.