Verticade -- Vertigo's full size MAME arcade cabinet
One of the many perks for working at Vertigo is Verticade: our new, full-size MAME arcade cabinet in the game room:
I already owned a SlikStik arcade controller when I started here at Vertigo; Scott was kind enough to meet us halfway and provide the SlikStik arcade cabinet and 27" Betson Arcade Monitor to mate it with.
Since I've built arcade cabinets before, I had some essential modifications in mind before we completed the cabinet. Of course, we had to start with custom marquee art. Rob Mansperger whipped up some fantastic marquee art, which we had printed at Mame Marquees:
I also added a 22" flourescent light fixture behind the marquee, and a small red cold cathode light behind the stock coin door to light up the coin return buttons. The net result?
The hardware powering Verticade is a salvaged Dell system with reasonably emulator-friendly specs:
- 2.0 ghz Pentium 4
- 120gb hard drive
- 512mb memory
I added a passively modified Radeon 9600 Pro video card to keep the system noise level down, and give us the ability to run 3D accelerated games if we want to. MAME is the obvious choice for this machine, but there are plenty of arcade-control friendly games out there for Windows as well. Since the 27" arcade monitor only supports resolutions up to 800x600, we don't need a super-beefy 3D card.
I moved the Dell's power switch outside the machine by soldering together a wire with a standard arcade button relay on the end. Unfortunately, Dell uses proprietary motherboard headers, otherwise I could have used a semi-standard Ignition-1 wired remote power switch. Our custom soldered power switch solution is taped to the back of coin return door #1, so you can power on (or off) the machine by pressing the lit coin return button. Speaking of power, we use the essential-to-any-arcade-cabinet Bits SmartStrip power strip, which automatically powers on everything in the cabinet when the PC is turned on.
The cabinet has stock cutouts and grills provided for standard round automobile-style 5 1/4" speakers, so we wired a Creative Inspire speaker system to some generic 5 1/4" car speakers we purchased from a local Best Buy. We chose the Creative Inspire speaker set because it has a subwoofer (gotta have bass) and more importantly because it has a remote volume control pod, as you'll see in a second. We stripped the speaker wires, tossed the original speakers, then soldered the wires to the newly installed 5 1/4" models at the top of the cabinet.
To launch games, we use the excellent GameEx front end which is, coincidentally, a .NET app:
99% of the UI can be driven by the player 1 joystick and buttons -- or the trackball, which acts as a traditional three button mouse.
For that other 1% of the time, the cabinet also includes a keyboard drawer just under the main controller:
We've kitted the keyboard tray out with some essentials:
The Verticade PC is connected to the Vertigo network, although it tends to stay in sleep mode most of the time. Or at least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it...