MAMEintosh v1 was the result of around 12 months of planning and construction. The final cabinet was a full upright machine powered by a G4 Macintosh running OSX and MacMAME. It includes a completely working coin mechanism, Sony XPlod 6" car speakers and a Logitech subwoofer.
My design for MAMEintosh v1.
The actual construction of the cabinet was a mixture of MDF and Pine with a few bits of boilerplate metal for effect. The sides of the cabinet as well as the control panel were laser cut from MDF from a local supplier in Sydney. The cutting was done from Illustrator files that I supplied to exact size. The MDF was 3mm thick which ended up being stable and light enough for my needs.
Before and After versions of MAMEintosh v1.
For the finish of the cabinet a Dulux enamel based paint was used with an air compressor and paint gun for the smoothest finish. The trick was getting the paint thinned out so that it flowed freely through the gun. Use a little bit of paint thinner until you get the right consistency. Its best to test this on a few spare bits of wood first.
Clear perspex stencil laser cut to perfection.
The logo on the sides proved to be difficult. I had a stencil made up from perspex that was used as a template with Dulux spray paint in a can, but it was hard to keep the logo from bleeding through the edges of the perspex. After much trial and error a neat finish was achieved, and some parts were hand painted to clean up.
The Mac
The machine in the cabinet is a Dual 500Mhz G4 PowerMac with 1.25GB RAM and an ATI Rage 128 Pro. It was a beastly machine in its time and to this date is still performs really nicely and most MAME games play flawlessly. Some games such as Mortal Kombat are very jerky, but all of the Neo Geo and most of the Capcom games work flawlessly.
The Mac boots up directly into MacMAME and using the application QuickKeys you can perform keyboard shortcuts via Player 1 to shut down the machine, return to the main menu and also select a game. QuickKeys isn't free, but it was the simplest solution at the time.
The screen is my old Apple 21" Studio Display. This screen is seriously awesome and is one of the best CRTs i've ever come across. It has a digital tube which allows you to re-align the beams in the software if they start playing up. The tube is a Sony Trinitron and the colours reproduce fantastically. The only problem is that the monitor weighs about 35 kilograms which means the cabinet needed extra strength to support the weight.
Controls
The joysticks and buttons came from Happ Controls in the USA who have excellent parts. These controllers and buttons are rated to over 10 million clicks and are competition grade. They can take a real beating.
This is how you shouldn't wire your controls.
The keyboard controller is an iPac from Ultimarc, this is the ultimate keyboard controller and I wouldn't recommend anything else. It connects via USB and allows you to map keyboard controls to each joystick movement and button. The wiring can be a bit messy but make sure you use decent gauge wire and strong quick connects for connection to the buttons and joysticks. Don't bother soldering, its just not worth it.
When wiring up the controls, remember that the joysticks are wired in reverse. So the left is wired to the right, up to down, etc. Its always a good idea to mark these on the base of your control panel so you don't get confused.
Sound
The sound system was a bit of a hack but it ended up being superb quality audio output. I bought a cheap pair of Logitech speakers with a subwoofer and actually took the speakers apart so that all I was left with was the volume and power controls and speaker wire attachments. If you're going to do this its important that the impedance on the speakers you're going to use match that of the sound system you're using. Check the specifications which should tell you.
It gets pretty messy hacking the speakers apart.
I stripped the wires from the Logitech and connected them to the Sony XPlod speakers. I didn't bother soldering the connection, instead I used good quality electrical tape to keep them together and insulated. This may or may not be dodgy, but its been working fine for the last 3 years.
I was then able to take the controller for the Logitech speakers and mount these on a piece of boilerplate which gives the cabinet speaker power and volume as well as a nifty little headphone jack.
I needed a good way to power on the cabinet itself. I had a spare iMac keyboard. The original iMac and G3 keyboards were the last USB keyboards that featured a power button. I pulled the keyboard apart so all I had was the power switch and mounted this on the inside back of the cabinet next to the screen. This made the most sense as the Apple screen has a 4 port USB hub. I connected the hacked keyboard to the screen and voila I can power on the cabinet by reaching my hand around the back.
Files
You can download the plans for the control panel here in EPS format. The plans are to exact size specified in millimetres. Please do not redistribute this file.