Advice needed on resurrecting my old MAME cabinet

I just stumbled onto this thread, great stuff. Like others here I have been messing around with a MAME cab for over twenty years. Started with just an empty shell I acquired.
Over the years, my original control panel became a little crowded with added controls for more gameplay variety. After visiting a good classic arcade last year I left feeling that the big difference in my home experience was the control panel.
I rebuilt my setup to have multiple control panels that easily swap out. I've enjoyed building them and have plans for more. Very happy with most of it so far. My Tron/trackball panel is still a bit of the hybrid panel I tried to get away from, but its not too bad. Still want to make an Asteroids, a Q-Bert, and an SNK panel.

I used MAMEWAH as my frontend when I started a couple decades ago, and still use it. I know it is pretty obsolete at this point, but it works well and does all that I need with enough customization options.
 

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I know you're pretty far into your project at this point Alan but if you decide to change course I do have an image of my MAME cabinet's hard drive. You and I set our machines up at about the same time in life, so a compatible motherboard would have you running in no time flat.

My system runs XP (everything hidden and a custom bios boot screen on the mb too) and Mala front-end. Rock solid for 15 years.

Yeah, ten years ago, I scrapped out the (dead due to motherboard capacitor plague) original Win XP PC. I wasn't into old PCs at the time, so I didn't save any parts of it.

This past winter, I had accumulated a pile of parts with the intent of building a Core2Duo Win XP retro PC. I could have stuck that in the MAME cabinet.
Ultimately, I decided that I wasn't nostalgic for Win XP and donated that entire pile of parts to Free Geek Twin Cities. Way too much old computer stuff piled around here...
 
I had originally planned to make several interchangeable control panels for my MAME cabinet. One with a 4-way joystick and a spinner, one with a trackball, etc.
The control panel in my MAME cabinet is identical in shape and size to that from a Taito Double Dragon cabinet. I used to own two of those DD cabinets.

I started with a generic 6-button layout with 8-way joysticks. For a DD cabinet, I made a control panel with two LS-30 rotary joysticks. The MAME cabinet had a special interface board so that I could use that panel in it, but that panel ultimately went with a DD cabinet when I sold it.

I never did get around to making more control panels for the MAME cabinet. I believe that I still have two wooden blanks that I cut but never used.
 
So what are you guys using in place of an ArcadeVGA board and j pac these days?
 
So what are you guys using in place of an ArcadeVGA board and j pac these days?
I am using a J-PAC with a Radeon card that is compatible with crt-emudrivers. There are a bunch of old cards that are compatible that you can find on eBay for like $15.

I actually flashed the firmware on mine recently with the atom-15 firmware so that the bios and windows loading screen are not out of sync.

I'm putting together 2 identical PCs right now to put in my Rush 2049 cabinets and I'm turning them into linked emulation machines. I won't have to worry about J-PAC or anything though because I'm also replacing the CRT's with LCD monitors, and I don't believe I'm going to even be using the JAMMA harness in the end.
 
I like using ultimarc ultrastick 360 joysticks and going to https://romcollector.com/ for his fully setup hyperspin and mame disk and a lot of others. the u360 is good because in mame you can have joystick maps with ini files that will change your ultrastick 360 to analog 4 way 8 way diagonal or 2 way within the game automatically.
 
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