MAME'd Marble Madness: Monitor Work
Category: MAME'd Marble Madness :: Cabinet News & Updates
The new Wells-Gardner K7200A horizontal monitor arrived today. Not bad... ground shipping only took from Monday to Wednesday.
I made a captioned gallery of tonight's pictures and provided a narrative below.
I love a new arcade monitor. After collecting so many classics and dealing with old, burned, finicky and dirty monitors, a fresh new monitor with protective plastic yet to be peeled from the tube is a marvel.
I built my last VGA to arcade monitor cable by hacking the end off a heavy-duty VGA cable and wiring on an existing plug from a discarded classic wiring harness. This time around I ordered Ultimarc's mostly pre-made cable sans the arcade plug to save time. It is nicely labeled and ready to be mated with whatever kind of end you need for your particular arcade monitor.
Tonight I cut a compatible connector for the monitor side off some piece of arcade junk in my attic, removed the pins, trimmed the wires and soldered them cleanly to the pre-tinned wires in the pre-made cable. I then heatshrink tubed each individual solder splice.
The arcade monitor end of my VGA adapter cable.
(click to enlarge)
The initial image was obviously out of sync (tearing hard on the diagonal and being mostly unrecognizable beyond colors). I manually touched the -V sync line (which was unconnected) to its pin on the monitor board and things snapped into place (turns out I needed both -H and -V on this monitor unlike my last one). I then heatshrink tubed the whole bundle so it will be cleaner and more durable.
The new monitor looks great. I needed to tweak up the screen knob a bit since it was running a little dark out of the box. The 15.7 kHz linux console and advmame/advmenu rc files I had created for testing on my other machine worked nicely right off the bat, so I began looking at some sample games and fiddling with advv to make optimized modelines.
Marble Madness running with accurate settings.
(click to enlarge)
So far, so good. I'm quite pleased with the results I am getting and I am already thinking I might bump up my older machine to this software level. I'll need to test an install on one of my other spare Dell machines (a match to what is in my existing cabinet) to see if the ATi hardware works as well as this Matrox G400 under framebuffer mode. If not, I might even see if I can locate a PCI Matrox G400.
For now, though, my focus is on building this new system and I'm making good time. My next step will be to borrow a pickup truck to go across the road and drag the Marble Madness machine from my office to the house. That will allow me to install the new monitor and begin fiddling with control panel designs. I might also wire up harnesses for the two trackballs so I can start testing the USB OptiPac stuff.
Tonight has been highly productive. I'll keep updating this site as things progress.
