33 year old from Oklahoma

Neurocrasher

New member
Joined
Oct 15, 2016
Messages
8
Reaction score
0
Location
Tulsa, Oklahoma
My name's Grant. I'm not sure why I haven't made a login until now because I actually end up here quite a bit. Galaga, Pole Position, and Dig Dug were my favorites as a kid and I'm a big fan of Atari and trackball games. I love reading and watching videos about arcades and I've been having a blast ever since I finally picked up my first game.

I got my first cab about four months ago: a gutted Mouse Trap which was painted black all over. It's temporarily running RetroPie on a spare LCD I had lying around. I picked up my second cab a week ago: a Pacman which has been converted into a Driving Force. Driving Force made some pretty ugly modifications to the PCB, but I think I can salvage it.

Anyway, I look forward to using the forums.
 
My name's Grant. I'm not sure why I haven't made a login until now because I actually end up here quite a bit. Galaga, Pole Position, and Dig Dug were my favorites as a kid and I'm a big fan of Atari and trackball games. I love reading and watching videos about arcades and I've been having a blast ever since I finally picked up my first game.

I got my first cab about four months ago: a gutted Mouse Trap which was painted black all over. It's temporarily running RetroPie on a spare LCD I had lying around. I picked up my second cab a week ago: a Pacman which has been converted into a Driving Force. Driving Force made some pretty ugly modifications to the PCB, but I think I can salvage it.

Anyway, I look forward to using the forums.
I'm just about to setup a retropie n a cocktail until I can find the time to restore it. Using a J-Pac as well so it can double as a test bed for boards.

Any gotchas? I picked it up and installed the image. Using a raspberry pi 3. Also usinga GERT vga 666 for video out but haven't configured that part yet.
 
I think the Pi has been the one thing that hasn't really given me any major problems. I remember setting aside a few hours to get it working, because I usually screw up on the software side of things, but it took less than an hour to setup. Certain encoders (I suspect older and/or cheaper) will make RetroPie think your controls are a gamepad, which is a minor annoyance, and what gets assigned "gamepad 1" and "gamepad 2" seems random, which really only confused me when I was assigning controls in individual game settings.

Mame4All seems to be the best all-around emulator while the AdvanceMame emulators are where I have the best luck with my trackball games, although I had to rebuild my roms (or download different ones) to get them to work in Advance. I keep the bulk of my 2,000 roms in the Mame4All folder for testing, then move the ones I've bullet-proofed to the Arcade folder and run the scraper on them there. The automatic scraper usually works well, but it will change the name of a game entirely sometimes (Bowl-A-Rama became Robot Bowl for whatever reason, and it couldn't find NBA Jam in the database, which doesn't make sense), so I like scraping the games manually, one by one, which is a lot less painful when you're doing it on a condensed list rather than every ROM you have. This way I have control over what my final list looks like, only have one version of each game, each game is definitely working, and anybody who comes over can use the Arcade folder without worrying about changing any of the settings. Meanwhile, if I find out about a game I've never heard of and want to try it, it's probably in my Mame4All folder, ready to play.

But yeah, I don't really remember any major problems, which is probably a good sign.
 
Back
Top Bottom