I decided to just make a whole thread to track this project, as I think I have a lot of good information that I can put in here to help someone out in the future potentially doing this. I have been documenting when I get stuck on stuff so that I know how I fixed it in case it happens again.
Anyways, I decided to turn my multi game cabinet mentioned in my sig, into an emulation cabinet instead. Initially I was going to just make it a MAME cabinet, but as I've played around with it more, it turns out there are alot of non-MAME emulated and PC games that I can play on it as well. And to my surprise, MAME is the one giving me the most pain in the ass of a problem right now.
Initially my plan was to keep the switcher in here, but I fried the aux board on accident so I'm going to get it repaired, but I was also seeing some power issues when having my PC hooked to the switcher, so for the time being, I am putting the switcher idea on the back burner until I get this in a state I want it to be in. My goal was to have my 1 external port and then 1 port with the PC, so just 2 on the switcher. That way if I ever wanna play a real game, I can hook it up via JAMMA without going inside the cabinet.
The setup is just a Windows 10 PC with an JPAC and a USB2GUN board to get the Happ guns working with a PC. Basically it allows Windows to treat the light guns as analog joysticks. That is all it sees the guns as - analog joysticks.
Then I also have an audio amp hooked up for sound too. And then I have enough power splitters to have 2 PSU's in there, 1 for cabinet and 1 ATX for the PC, so everything comes on with the flick of one switch.
I am using Hyperspin as the front end but I haven't configured it yet to be scrollable with the guns yet and am using the keyboard for the time being. I do have it setup though so it is just 1 big wheel of games so there will be no menus to dig through, just a wheel with all light gun games on it.
Right now I have the following working pretty flawlessly
- Model 2 emulator with Virtua Cop and House of the Dead
- Friction Arcade
- Silent Hill Arcade
And I have MAME working however I am having some calibration issues that I haven't been able to figure out yet.
I got AtomisWave working yesterday as well but did not config the controls so I want to try that tonight, and then I want to try and get the laser disc games working if I can.
Anyways, I am going to just plan on keeping this like a log of this project until it's "finished" in the sense that I am satisfied with it.