upright Touchscreen Mame/Pinball Cabinet

[mace]

Hi All,

Thought that I would post up a video of my latest project, up until now I've only used PinballX for Pinmame cabs but having bought an old Skillball cabinet with a vertical display I thought that GameeX would be the way to go.

Here's a video of the complete project: 

...and a few pictures too.

I need to make the usual thanks, particularly to Jukedock for the controller and jukebox knowledge, Phil for making the bespoke plastics and Mike for making me the touchscreen. This time I managed to get through this by reading the forum and I didn't need to ask any questions - that's a tribute to the group. As for Tom's work and inspiration from posts by Draco and many others, well you all know that you are legends, thank you.

 

[Draco1962]

Awesome concept and a great write up! Thanks for the kind words! Successful projects are the goal.

Be ready as you may have some detailed questions coming your way!

Thanks for sharing!

[Draco1962]

Would you mind sharing your gameex.ini and telling us about your setup, hardware, software choices, etc.?

[mace]

No worries, one other member who is a good friend also saw my cabinet in its raw state and decided to build his own cab from the same base, he did not go down the touchscreen route but added a DMD and a Backglass mini monitor. I've attached images of my cabinet before I started the build and his before and when it was nearly complete too. Jukedock deserves credit for getting his build completed well before me too, especially as he started after I did. I loved his PIN2DMD but as you can't really see it during game play I decided to drop it from my build after initially installing one. One interesting point is I also found full screen pinball tables felt a bit 'odd' on an upright so I leaned all mine back. Hopefully these images will help you track down an old Skillball or Hook a Duck cabinet they are built by Nova as the Four Seasons. I will say that they are well built, the steel base plate is 6mm and cutting through it to lose the unneeded side part was a royal PITA.

As for the details of my build the 32" monitor runs at 768x1280 so not many horses are needed under the bonnet to get things running.  It's a basic A8-3750K PC running Win 7 x64 with 4Gb of ram and an Nvidea GT 1030 card running DVI to the display. The card was chosen as its low profile, low cost and so frugal on power I was able to use the PC's existing PSU to drive it. The controller is a Kade and when the lower door is opened many of the buttons remap to simulate the arcade service buttons, this is indicated by a change of lighting on the LED's in the buttons. Everything Is held on a 120Gb SSD with a 540Gb HDD for the music and SSD backup. It also has a Bluetooth dongle so you can use the cabinets 2+1 audio (Stereo and Sub Woofer) as a stand alone amp. There's WiFi, control panel illumination and an external USB port too. A 5v feed from the PC is used to drive a switch board which supplies mains power to the Amp. The touchscreen is custom, made by  visualplanet, a friend's business, although it should be easy enough to put in another make, it's really for he Jukebox software but it does makes programming a breeze to be able to move the cursor by touch too. I didn't worry about a real plunger this time or nudge sensing as I installed extra buttons for those functions. The build was all sourced from eBay, used parts mainly, and after finding money in the cabinet and selling off its original coin mech the whole hardware part of the project has come in under 250 :-)

The software installed is:

- Gameex

- Mameplus64

- Daphene

- Pinball FX2/FX3

- Pro Pinball 

- The Pinball Arcade (tables called through TPAFreeCamMod)

- Zaccaria Pinball (tables called through a modified AHK script I found on the forum, that may have been yours Draco)

- Visual Pinball 10

- Ultimate Jukebox

They all run as administrator, under an Aero theme except for Visual Pinball 10 which has the desktop composition disabled to help stop micro stuttering. Everything is run full screen for speed, even The Pinball Arcade, although it does prevent adjusting the TPAFreeCamMod settings this way.

Hope this helps, I'll pop up the .ini in my next post.....

 

My original cabinet with its missing PC & door:

 

Jukedock's build based on the same cabinet style: 

[Draco1962]

I think that the script for Zaccaria was by Carny_Priest but don't hold me to it.  So just GameEx for running the pins as well as MAME and DAPHNE?

[Draco1962]

I have been intrigued by this Vertigo design by VPCabs. The $3495 price tag seems a little steep and I think I can probably build (with the right tools and plenty of corrections along the way) for at least half that or even less, provided I can find decent schematics. It may not be touchscreen when finished but to be able to play both arcade and pins on the same machine without the horizontal footprint that you get with even a mini-pin may be worth it.

[mace]

11 hours ago, Draco1962 said:

I think that the script for Zaccaria was by Carny_Priest but don't hold me to it.  So just GameEx for running the pins as well as MAME and DAPHNE?

Blast , I owe Carny_Priest for help on my pin cab build, so a BIG thank you goes out to him as well.

Yep, I started from the same viewpoint, in my case it went 'if I made it smaller would it fit in the.....'

All running on Gameex, Mame dictated that platform in the end and the lists work far better on the vertical (I tried both). Here's the gameex.ini you requested as promised:

GameEx.ini

[RIP-Felix]

Love to see another vert-cab in the wild. I like to see them neat cables!

[stigzler]

Awesome sauce.

[mace]

Just realised that I forget to mention a couple of tips to other touch screen users....

- It's vital to set Arcade  Mode to off on touchscreen builds

- Some of the themes will not work on touchscreen builds. So if you can get the click animation and see the touch working but nothing selects the open your theme folder. Find the theme.ini file and make sure in its 'General' section there is the following entry:

ArcadeMode=False

- If you want your touch screen to work in Mame then add the -mouse switch to the Mame settings command line section

Hope this helps someone.

[Ordovice]

On 9/19/2018 at 10:51 AM, Draco1962 said:

I have been intrigued by this Vertigo design by VPCabs. The $3495 price tag seems a little steep and I think I can probably build (with the right tools and plenty of corrections along the way) for at least half that or even less, provided I can find decent schematics. It may not be touchscreen when finished but to be able to play both arcade and pins on the same machine without the horizontal footprint that you get with even a mini-pin may be worth it.

Did you ever wind up working on a design based on this?  I'm thinking I want to build one like this as well. 

[Draco1962]

I have not begun any work. If I do, it will be a custom job unless a flat pack of this cab is produced. My main constraint is space.