It's finally started

After 1-2 years of a cabinet sitting in my garage, I am finally on my way to building The Arcade Cabinet. It is an old Road Blasters cabinet that I saved from being thrown away. It's in pretty good shape. A few things are missing, but that just creates new opportunities to do something cool.

The cabinet work is being put on hold until it warms up. In the meantime, I am working on the computer portion of it.

I started with a P3 600mhz running FreeDOS. After having trouble with CDROM and sound card drivers, I gave up. I went the easy route and installed Windows 98 on a Celeron 1.7mhz with a Compaq S910 monitor (19"). The cabinet can hold a 19" monitor, so this should work well. So far, I am using MAME v102 with a MAMEWAH frontend. Windows 98 boots pretty quickly on this computer.

My goals with this cabinet:
1) be able to play Ms Pac-Man up to Mortal Kombat 3, Street Fighter ????, and some SNK fighting games. So far, so good.
2) create artwork and marquees from images gathered on the 'net.
3) install trackball, and 2 joysticks with Street Fighter style button layout. I guess I will need a run button as well for MK.
4) learn some other skills (carpentry, soldering, electrical, ...) other than those required to run a computer.

To Do:
1) tweak MAMEWAH until I'm tired of tweaking it.
2) limit games to those I have an interest in playing
3) configure games: sizing, volume, controls
4) boot windows straight into MAMEWAH.