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Old 06-08-2012, 10:43 AM
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AiboPet AiboPet is offline
"micro" and quirky
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: I'm in San Diego, but lived in Hong Kong for a long time
Posts: 707
Yup...COMPLETELY understand the space thing. This little flat is NICE, but I think I only have 975 square feet total...and no garage.

I was sad and REAL apprehensive to turn the Donkey Kong cabinet into a modern computer system, but it really was the way to go if I wanted to play with other DK versions....or play my Frogger or Galaga machine without bringing them down here to San Diego.

Only about six months ago did I finally give in to converting it to an LCD. I was running a 20" CRT vga monitor for the LONGEST time to simply keep the CRT look, scanlines, etc.

Aside from the control panel....and the fact that "I" know the thing is running WindowsXP/MAME inside on a faceless WinTel chassis inside.....It really DOES make for a good stable arcade machine. Of course I've KEPT it as a DK cabinet and not done any weird MAME marquee or anything. Looks just like the original machine except I did have to build a new control panel that could handle things like Crazy Climber (two joysticks), Centipede (trackball), etc.

As sort of an homage to the original hardware though....I did mount the new hardware inside the original Faraday cage....on the same "bottom left" corner where all of it was before. It's actually MUCH cleaner than the original stuff with that huge power supply in the bottom. Also....my little "kill-a-watt" meter shows this setup pulling a little over 60watts total. The old Sanyo monitor would REALLY heat up the corner of a room before.

The old hardware also did NOT get tossed. Anything useful was given to the friend with the Radarscope cabinet. He can use that power supply if he needs to, etc. We even still have the original DK boards somewhere, even though there is something wrong with 'em.

Last edited by AiboPet; 06-08-2012 at 10:52 AM.
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