Readers Drives - C-Macc's

Posted at: Friday 17th October 2008

A PC in an arcade cabinet, emulating thousands of retro games

THE COMPONENTS

Deciding which PC components to use was fairly easy. Although emulating older gaming systems is no problem for most modern CPUs, I wanted to make sure that performance wouldn't be a problem even when emulating more recent consoles. For this reason, I opted for an Intel Core2 Quad Q6600, with a generous 3GB of memory.

Early on I encountered a major problem with the display. An arcade monitor such as the one built into the C-Macc's uses a 15-31KHz signal, but PC graphics cards output a different frequency by default. The solution is a program called Soft-15KHz, which edits the registry and forces the VGA card to run at the frequencies that arcade machines require.

The wasn't the end of my display problems. Arcade monitors require 5V to run properly, but a PC only outputs 1.5V. Although I could see a picture on the screen, the result was a dim, shallow image, as there simply wasn't enough voltage. Thankfully, I'm not the first person to have come across this problem, and after more research, I discovered a device called the J-PAC (www.ultimarc.com/jpac.html). This handy add-on uses the USB interface on your PC, from which it draws power, thus providing the necessary 5V required to drive a VGA signal.


WE'RE JAMMING

I realised that a problem with the C-Macc's would be manually switching between the PC and the consoles inside the cabinet. I didn't want to be forced to open the arcade unit every time I wanted to change games. Thankfully, another clever add-on card for arcade machines exists called the JAMMA 6-in-1 (www.jammaboards.com). Using this, I can connect up to six JAMMA boards to one arcade system. I plugged all the consoles, controllers and PC into this board, and can switch between them using a wireless remote control.

With so many gaming systems squeezed into a small space and no way to circulate air, temperatures within the cabinet rose dramatically. I fitted four 120mm fans to draw in air at the rear of the cabinet, and two 120mm fans to blow air out through the top.

Another problem is that standard JAMMA arcade units only produce mono audio. A major aspect of recreating the original arcade experience relies on audio, and stereo audio is simply a better option, so I fitted a new set of speakers to the cabinet.

I didn't need to spend much money on these, as I found an old stereo with speakers for just £5. It was broken, but after looking inside, I found that only the capacitors had blown. Once I had replaced them, the stereo worked perfectly. I sanded down the speakers, painted them with a white gloss to match the rest of the case, and then finished the wiring.

SOFTWARE

The final task was to install the software on the PC. Once Windows XP was up and running, I installed all the emulators and copied my ROMs (which are backups of original games I own) over to a hard disk. This posed one final problem - I didn't want to rely on a keyboard, mouse and command prompt to control C-Macc's, as I wanted the system to be as user-friendly as possible. I decided to use a front-end called GameEx (www.gameex.net), which can load games through any command line-based emulator within a 3D interface. With this in place, people can simply walk up to C-Macc's and select a game to play, no matter which emulator it uses.