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Let's Connect a PC to an Arcade Cab, Shall we??!!

RealMFnG

RealMFnG

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In my opinion, a PC is the best way to leverage emulation to be able to play old arcade games in a single arcade cab. I am sure others opine differently, but there is tremendous economic value in doing so, so let's examine them:
  • A decommissioned PC costs you nothing. Basically, the PC sitting in your closet for the last few years since your last upgrade can be repurposed for use as a PCB in your arcade cab
  • If you don't have a sacrificial PC handy, a suitable one just to run MAME will cost you about $50 shipped from eBay
    • I will be using such a PC as we go along in this discussion
    • Also, someone in your network might just be tossing one out that you can pick up for free
  • Now you just need to interface your PC to an arcade and power it
    • Alternate emulation platforms require such an interface anyway (MiSTer, Raspberry Pi). A PC's interface is less costly
    • We shall explore all avenues to interface a PC to your cab and different cabs that you may have (JAMMA & JVS)
    • We shall explore how to power the PC so that it is non-destructive to your cab
      • It is pretty darn easy actually
We won't get into the disparity about where a particular platform lands in the spectrum of genuine versus ports versus FPGA emulation versus software emulation. What we are trying to do here is to be:
  1. Economical
    • Spend as little as possible to get the most games as possible to be played on our cabs. We all know the OG is always the best. Heck, you can download DC ISO's and burn them to CDR without modding your DC and they'll play exactly like an OG copy, yet people still collect DC games. Nothing beats OG; we all know this. So let's put those sentiments aside as we explore this.
  2. Non-Destructive
I've put together many MAME PC-based arcade cabs, never had one come back. Made lots of friends along the way. One guy told me he had a block party in his neighborhood and he wheeled out the MAME cab I set up for him. It was a hit with all the kids in the neighborhood. I put one together for a highly respected member of this forum even. He has said it is rock solid and hasn't come out of his TATE set Sega Blast City since. He says he uses it to explore games that he doesn't have the original PCB of, determines if he enjoys it, then explores if he wants to pursue owning an OG PCB. We've even postulated conducting a Pepsi challenge with another discerning forum member to see if that member could tell the difference. But we failed, not because of gameplay differences, but because the setup was exposed.

We'll take this step-by-step and link back to the OP as we go.

EDIT: Rather than doing this the long traditional way, we will be using @chunksin's GroovyTime image which greatly simplifies the effort.

NOTE: All of this is a Work-in-Progress right now
  1. PC Prep
  2. Acquiring your MAME roms set
  3. GroovyTime
  4. Input/Output Options to an Arcade Cab
  5. Powering the PC
 
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This is awesome. Love the idea of this thread--especially from someone with so much experience and knowledge in this space.

Admittedly, I've recently recognized that my bias against software emulation, while strictly personal and never pushed on others, is a bit silly. The convenience of Mister and my recent use of a laptop for cab-based Fightcade action, has opened my eyes to the upside of emulation. The only aspect that still gives me pause, is that having the sheer variety of games a MAME box provides, makes it very difficult for me to just enjoy the few games I actually have time to play.
 
Step 1: PC Prep

So this is the PC we shall be using for this effort:

1644339327040.png


This PC was selected because:
  1. It is cheap
  2. It has an AMD A-series video chipset onboard which has a VGA video connection and is compatible with Calamity's CRT Emu driver
    • If you don't have such a PC, fret not. You can just buy a Radeon HD5000 series (or higher) video card to suit the need. You will however need a DVI-to-VGA dongle. Also, I would recommend staying away from those DMS9 video connectors from Dell. Those cables tend to fail a lot
      • If just running MAME, you'll want the cheapest possible Radeon series card. MAME emulation is all CPU-driven. If you want to run other emulators (Demull for Naomi games), you'll need a beefier card. In this discussion, we will be focusing on MAME
The intent here is this PC is sacrificial. It will never touch the Internet. It will live the remainder of its days stuffed inside a cab. With whatever PC you choose to sacrifice, you might want to change out the CMOS battery at this point, especially if it is older hardware. Now boot into the system BIOS and go into the Power options. You'll want to set the option for "Power Restore" to "Always on" or "Power on", or whatever option will set the PC to turn on by itself when it is fed power. Later as we connect power to the cab, with a flip of a switch, the PC powers on with the cab. Other MAME folks use a smart power strip. But that is an added unneccessary expense which we shall skip. Go out and download all the drivers needed for your PC, with the exception of your video graphics drivers.

Pro-Tip!

We want to eliminate any semblance of your arcade cab being driven by a PC, if possible. We want none to be the wiser. Once the PC gets past the BIOS screens, Windows will be completely hidden. However, the BIOS screens will display brief on boot-up. If your BIOS allows for:
  1. Quick boot
    • Set it to 'Yes'
  2. Boot logo to be changed
    • Use this one below or an alternate one of your choosing
Little touches make all the difference!

backgroundDefault.jpg

You are done with PC Prep. On to the next steps!
 
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Watching with interest. With the price of boards these days I definitely see the value in having a solid mame setup to use as a try before you buy machine.
 
Hehe I've this set up in 7x cabs. Looking forward to seeing your take on it.

Groovymame I can tell you is indistinguishable from the pcb IMHO.

Likewise demul at 640x480 is perfect.
View: https://youtu.be/8w2MXsq2l6I


i really think the reason mister is getting so popular is because most people nowadays have very little IT skills.

Mister = run update_all script, plug in the IO interface. Done.

PC = download emus. Download roms. Understand file paths and configure them. Install a frontend interface. Get appropriate graphics card, hack the os to test mode, get ati card, install emu driver, configure vmmaker, get an io interface . Etc etc. 99% of the world is lost at the 3rd step :) If someone could make an update-all script to script it all it would convert more people.
 
Bluetear said:
This is awesome. Love the idea of this thread--especially from someone with so much experience and knowledge in this space.

Admittedly, I've recently recognized that my bias against software emulation, while strictly personal and never pushed on others, is a bit silly. The convenience of Mister and my recent use of a laptop for cab-based Fightcade action, has opened my eyes to the upside of emulation. The only aspect that still gives me pause, is that having the sheer variety of games a MAME box provides, makes it very difficult for me to just enjoy the few games I actually have time to play.
Click to expand...
When I explored MiSTer a year back, it didn't offer me anything above what I can gain from PC emulation. Plus, MiSTer has its limits. You'll never be able to emulate NAOMI, for instance, with MiSTER. With a PC, you can. I am not saying a PC doesn't have its peccadillos and again, nothing beats OG. But every solution has its limits. Then there are the investment costs; MiSTer wasn't cheap then.

Again, we have two goals in this thread: 1) be economical 2) be non-destructive.

Stay tuned.
 
MickyMac said:
PC = download emus. Download roms. Understand file paths and configure them. Install a frontend interface. Get appropriate graphics card, hack the os to test mode, get ati card, install emu driver, configure vmmaker, get an io interface . Etc etc. 99% of the world is lost at the 3rd step :) If someone could make an update-all script to script it all it would convert more people.
Click to expand...
Someone on this forum made an image that does just that. I haven't used it myself but perhaps I can explore it in this thread as well.

Stay tuned.
 
Step 2: Acquring your MAME roms set

I won't get too far into where you will need to go to get the MAME roms. If you need that info, you can check this thread out for where you need to go. You'll want to acquire your MAME roms & CHD's first, then acquire the version of GroovyMAME that matches that rom set. If you don't, good chance your MAME setup won't work. It is that simple.

We'll use Calamity's fork of MAME which is called GroovyMAME (thank you sir for lending your genius to this hobby) because of the following reasons quoted from BYOC:

What is GroovyMAME?​
​
GroovyMAME is a M.A.M.E. fork aimed at CRT monitors, with a strong focus on CRT preservation, since this is the only display technology that accurately replicates the genuine video game experience. However you can use GroovyMAME to alleviate some of the annoyances associated to emulation on LCD displays, specially for those models which are capable of refreshing at custom rates.​

If you don't already have a MAME rom set, it is going to take you days to download it. Once downloaded, it will take you quite some time to extract the roms. You'll want to do this on a separate PC then have a way to copy them over your MAME rig later. So it is advisable that you do the extraction on a fast PC and copy the roms set to an external USB drive for which you can copy over to your (potentially, low end) MAME rig later. Now head over to BYOC and download the version of GroovyMAME that matches the revision of your MAME rom set

A word on the CHD's for MAME:
MAME is a comprehensive archival effort. Many of those CHD's are for games that cannot yet be emulated. Games like DDR and most of the later games are years away from playable emulation, if ever. CHD's take up a ton of space. If you have HDD space to spare (which should NOT be a problem in 2022), put your entire set of roms and CHD's on your PC's drive. If not, you'll want to delete some them to save space (they can't be played anyway). One thing I have always struggled with is after setting a playlist that I want in my MAME box (we'll get into this later), finding a program that deletes the unwanted roms and unwanted CHD's. This is harder than it sounds as there are parent roms that if they are deleted, the game doesn't play. So my approach, copy to my emulation box every single rom from my MAME set (they are the zip files), but only copy over the CHD's that are needed for the games I want to play. For instance, Killer Instinct must have the CHD, or any CPS3 game. Heh, once DDR is playable in MAME, what are you going to do, use an SF2 layout to play it? Yeah, no. Delete those roms/CHD's you'll know you'll never play, if storage space is a concern.

Alright, on to the next step.
 
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Nice thread and great topic. I've personally been doing PC builds for 14 years and have worked through just about every windows problem you can imagine to get it to be a stable and seemless arcade cab experience. That being said, this thread got me thinking about why I never got into being interested in PC builds for CRT's.

Reason being? With there being no real limits on PC hardware - I always want it all and find myself indexing on more modern stuff (PS3/Switch/Steam) first. Primarily, this means I'm in LCD panel territory. Then I deal with finding great post processing effects to make it look like a CRT if needed for older games. CRT emulation is pretty damn good now because CRT monitors are getting harder and harder to come by.

For that reason, putting any sort of PC in my NACs is a bit frustrating/limiting to me and I prefer my multi's or Mistercade. These are not cheap CRT solutions though, as noted... But at least with the Mister - everything that's supported was created for CRT displays. Yes I realize this is a pretty silly way of thinking since I should just do the PC build for sub 2000's games and call it a day, but that'd bug me to no end knowing there's a PC in there that can be upgraded and pushed :P

That's my situation with my NACs - the PRas3 is a totally different story for me though.

PRas3 which is already a PC based system & LCD - it's as turnkey as you'll get.
1. Buy a SEGA PRas3 & ALLS UX board
2. Swap SSD for Windows 10 image
3. Install whatever you want
4. Play it all

It's not cheap @$1600-$2k for the setup... but considering the price of CRT cabs these days, this is likely going to be the more cost effective way to go if someone doesn't already have a CRT setup. With more future potential than a CRT will provide you.

For folks that do have a CRT setup and don't mind being limited on what you can do, I agree this guide is cost effective and great. Emulation has come a long way and it's worth checking out.

Thanks for sharing!
 
Once you start getting into the year 2000+ era hardware emulation/conversions (Demul, Teknoparrot) you need to have a higher resolution monitor to avoid the interlaced flicker. At least a 31K CRT. Ideally trisync or quadsync up to 800x600 will cover a very very wide range of games in their original form. Even then, modern widescreen games can be tried but they are not always great looking if the aspect ratio cannot be hacked.
 
Step 3: GroovyTime

I had originally set out to compose this discussion with all the tedious setups needed to install MAME, install the front end, install CRT Emu, test everything, then hide Windows. GroovyTime takes care of all of this for us in a way that gets us to the place where we want to be, only a whole lot faster and easier.

You'll want to do 3 things at this point:
  1. Get a USB flash drive with about 12GB capacity
  2. Download rufus which you will use to burn GroovyTime to the USB flash drive
  3. Dowload GroovyTime
Now use rufus to burn GroovyTime to the USB flash drive. Once done, copy over the drivers for your MAME rig to the GroovyTime USB flash drive in the 'DRIVERS' directory. The instructions for GroovyTime are very well written, there is no need for me to repeat them. Just follow them as stated here (though I may add some screenshots later to simplify things) and I'll just call out some additional things that I feel would be of value.

GroovyTime will install Calamity's CRT Emu drivers and will take you through what you need to do for creating the modelines. The key here is when you are setting up GroovyTime to do it on an LCD monitor that can sync to and display a standard computer signal (31khz) AND an arcade signal (15khz) . You sort of have to get lucky to have an LCD that can do this. But having one is invaluable for MAME setup. The good news is we have a thread that catalogs known LCD monitors that can do this. and the LCD you have might be able to display a 15khz signal just well enough for you to get through the setup. And if you decide to pursue finding an LCD that can display 15khz, they are like everywhere.
 
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Kagaden said:
Yes I realize this is a pretty silly way of thinking since I should just do the PC build for sub 2000's games and call it a day, but that'd bug me to no end knowing there's a PC in there that can be upgraded and pushed
Click to expand...
Not at all. This is one of the reasons why people don't mess around with MAME, despite it having been around for years. Human minds have biases; shame being probably the biggest one. It's what I call "The-Ridiculously-Hot-Woman-Married-to-a-Loser" syndrome.

1644414439502.png


It's such a shameful waste when we see it. On the flip side, achieving a specific goal is the reason for each PC build. Achieving the goal justifies the cost and eliminates the shame in the end if done correctly. So props to whoever pulls it off!

By now, everyone has purchased a PC or laptop and knows full well the cost of such an endeavor. Seems like such a terrible economic waste to take that investment and repurpose it for a singular low-level application such as this and not have easy access to it for other modern general computing applications: social media, playing games, streaming media, surfing the Net, paying bills, etc. Plus, you are clearly a PC snob (I mean this in a good way), so it is a pretty big mental hurdle for you. Over the years on this forum, I have said many times over that allocating a modern PC with all the bells and whistles just for MAME is way way overkill (here, here, here). But it is possible in 2022 to be very economical and have a superior experience over other emulation platforms. I demonstrated this here previously. That is probably the lowest spec'ed PC I have ever gotten MAME to run on :). Not an ounce of shame spilled into that build :).

Probably best that you approach a dedicated PC for sub-2000's gaming with fundamentals:
  1. Set the goal for the PC build
    • Which I am sure you do for each PC build
  2. Build/acquire the PC to attain that goal
    • Budget-ize accordingly
Should be good to go from there!
 
Hey @MickyMac, I didn't watch your entire video, but what front end are you using? HyperSpin or AttractMode with the HyperSpin theme?
 
I use the original hyperspin. It hasn't been updated in a few years now but It still does 95% of what I need and the other 5% I use little add-on helper apps like joytokey.
Everything is stock original hardware so you can swap between original PCB's and the PC in a few seconds.

Following this thread with interest.
 
I'd say crt emu driver looks indistinguishable from real hardware. The only thing is a lot of tutorials will tell you to set a single super resolution of like 2560x240. I think at the bare minimum you should define all the necessary vertical resolutions (224, 240, etc) otherwise you will have scaling problems.

Also, imo, you CAN see the difference between proper native res and a super res horizontally. I don't mind adjusting the horizontal width for personal use since that's just how it is when swapping real boards.

Not to spoil the big reveal but here's some CRT emu driver shots on my Blast City at 15khz.
PXL_20220122_065937978.jpgPXL_20220125_022230788.jpgPXL_20220125_022247835.jpg
 
The thing about that is 224p vertical PCBs is are actually outputting 240p vertical with black bars. The arcade op was supposed to use the monitors vertical adjustment to stretch it out to fill the screen.
EMUdriver fixes the horizontal problem as all games are the exact same horizontal width and no adjustment is required. However you have to manually adjust the vertical height for each game or find an average position you are happy with that suits most games.
 
I found when using 240p as the output vertical resolution it was scaling the game to a full 240p. This is with FBNeo in Fightcade though, not mame. And the extra wide super resolution should solve the horizontal problem, but I swear I can tell the difference between native and super. Certain edges just looked a bit fuzzy.
 
@RealMFnG great you changeed your mind are doing this tutorial now.

Do you by any chance have any knowledge in setting up a groovyarcade setup as well?

i read that it would be needed to flash a custom bios on the radeon cards if you don't want to damage your 15k crts, that's why i went that route. it more or less works, but im probably missing some essential settings and need to get the frontend pretty...
Oh, and i somehow don't know which romset i need for a particular groovyarcade version (probably also easy and i'm just dumb...)
 
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