Hi from new uk member and OC noob

[Cretster]

Hi guys, great info you have on here. I'm pretty new to the world of over locking despite building, tweaking, repairing machines for around 15 years or so. Never really had a need before to overclock but now I do with a project I'm working on.

It's a scratch build arcade cabinet thats running Mame and a bunch of other emulators.

Looking forward to digging through all the useful info on here and hopefully joining in a bit!

Cheers
Jim

[Maurice]

Welcome to eocf.

A lot of friendly, and helpful people on here.

[DarkTower87]

Hello and welcome! Glad to have you. What are your system specs? Got any tech pron (pics of the cabinet)?

Additional Comment:

Originally Posted by Maurice

Welcome to eocf.

A lot of friendly, and helpful people on here.

Ya ninja'd me!

[Subedei]

Wellcome Matey...good to see another Brit on here

[Cretster]

Thanks guys

Originally Posted by DarkTower87

Hello and welcome! Glad to have you. What are your system specs? Got any tech pron (pics of the cabinet)?

System spec for the cabinet machine is not a lot. It's running an Asus P5WDG2-WS Pro board, 4gb of OCZ PC8500 DDR2 ram, a thermaltake Sonic Tower2 with 120mm fan, and an E6600 CPU that's overclocked to currently about 3.25ghz (just an FSB tweak).

The problem I've got is trying to get it to run right on an E8400 I bought as an upgrade. It's just not having it even though the bios is fine to accept a wolfdale on this board.

Other machines I've got are:
Main desktop - i7 2600K with 8gb DDR3, cheapy N210 gfx card (I've no real need for a fancy card), 120gb Crucial M4 SSD
Macbook pro 13" - i5, upgraded with 240gb Sandisk SSD
HTPC (tiny thing that sits under my telly and runs XBMC) - AMD A6 3500, 4gb DDR3, Mini-itx board (I forget which).

Then there's various other PCs dotted around like one in my garage that I use with a 17" touchscreen for PDF docs when I'm working on stuff out there, a dev machine with an offline copy of my forum etc.

Will post up a pic of the cabinet shortly!

[DarkTower87]

Originally Posted by Cretster

Thanks guys



System spec for the cabinet machine is not a lot. It's running an Asus P5WDG2-WS Pro board, 4gb of OCZ PC8500 DDR2 ram, a thermaltake Sonic Tower2 with 120mm fan, and an E6600 CPU that's overclocked to currently about 3.25ghz (just an FSB tweak).

The problem I've got is trying to get it to run right on an E8400 I bought as an upgrade. It's just not having it even though the bios is fine to accept a wolfdale on this board.

Other machines I've got are:
Main desktop - i7 2600K with 8gb DDR3, cheapy N210 gfx card (I've no real need for a fancy card), 120gb Crucial M4 SSD
Macbook pro 13" - i5, upgraded with 240gb Sandisk SSD
HTPC (tiny thing that sits under my telly and runs XBMC) - AMD A6 3500, 4gb DDR3, Mini-itx board (I forget which).

Then there's various other PCs dotted around like one in my garage that I use with a 17" touchscreen for PDF docs when I'm working on stuff out there, a dev machine with an offline copy of my forum etc.

Will post up a pic of the cabinet shortly!

Nice! got a lot of machines (nothing wrong with that). Looking forward to the pics. I was considering buying a broken cabinet and fixing it up with a little cheap PC inside. I just don't really know how I would hook up the controller yet.

[Cretster]

If you buy something that already is a cabinet then you got a BIG head start mate. I started with an old wardrobe!

It's not finished - I doubt it ever will be, and my plan is that once I figure out finally exactly how everything should be, or what bits I would do different etc, that I will build a second much nicer one that I will take my time with, so that it hopefully ends up being something to be really proud of. This one works pretty good though.

Re' controllers, depends what you want to run on it and what controls you want to use.
You can mostly buy adaptors to use most controls with a PC though. If you emulate console games then you can use regular arcade controls for everything up to about the era of a SNES and Megadrive. Beyond that though you really need to use the Console game pads through an adaptor as it starts to get too complex and messy with stuff like analog stick + D pads + shoulder buttons + triggers etc etc.

Pic #1 anyway - this is how it mostly looks right now:


Notice the pedals, but where's the wheel I hear you ask?

Right here - the front panel folds down to allow the wheel to rotate out and lock in place above the panel when you close it again:



Also, there's a keyboard that swings out if you need it, although it doesn't lock in place in any particular way at the moment. It's a nuisance but it's there when you need it for setup stuff:



The rectangle hole is where it did have a 7" touchscreen monitor until it died. The cabinet marquee (you probably can't tell) is a collage I made from my favourite film: Commando! The monitor basically had the film playing on it while the cabinet was running. What more could you want!

Just recently I added a 3" trackball to the controls, which I use as the mouse, and today I fitted 6 new buttons, 3 of them being at the sides/front so I can use them as pinball controls.

Only other thing I badly want to have in it somehow is a flight stick that is hidden somehow until I want it. Not sure how though. I've got a saitek cyborg Evo that would be ace for it for playing afterburner and ace combat etc, but I haven't figured out how to integrate it into the cabinet yet.

Additional Comment:

It's all a bit rough to be honest, but first try at making something like this, and finesse is NOT my middle name sadly.

It mostly functions great though and that's what I'm bothered about for now at least.

Excuse the mess by the way!

[DarkTower87]

That is so cool. It looks really good for being an unfinished product. Really like everything. Thanks for posting the pics. If you want some help or suggestions post in the Member's Showcase or case section. I am sure someone has done this before at some time and may be able to help you or give you some fresh ideas. Regardless looks amazing.

[Cretster]

Cheers chief. There's a few forums specially for this stuff - BYOAC would be the biggest I think.

Yeah it's good enough that I can enjoy playing it now, with at least a slightly authentic arcade feel. I would love to get a really polished product built eventually though with top class artwork and finish etc.

Here's a pic at an earlier build stage:



And here's a better view of the marquee I designed. I sooo need to get a decent copy printed up so it looks right with the cathode light behind it. This is without the title added afterwards:

[DarkTower87]

Well it certainly has come a long way. I didn't see all of the detail on that commando image until you posted it up. Once you get the lighting squared away it will look even better.

[Mr.Scott]

It's awesome. Great job.

[Cretster]

Cheers chaps.

Well there's been a slight change or two now.

The Commandotron900 is now running a core i5 2500k, overclocked to 4.2ghz, with 4gb ddr3 memory, and running on a sandisk 240gb SSD. It also has a real graphics card which is novel for me as I've never before bothered having more than the absolute minimum in terms of graphics, since I've always been a console gamer and had no need. I bought a second hand Asus 6850, and I have to say it makes a pretty big difference!

So now I've got some up to date PC driving games on it. Well, it would have been silly to have the effort of building an arcade machine, with steering wheel & pedals, the. Not be able to play up to date games! :d

[DarkTower87]

That is great! What games? Burnout Paradise would be fun on that thing. Not to mention Dirt series. All you need is a flight stick for some serious flight sim fun!

[Cretster]

Oops, missed your reply sorry.

Have already got a flight stick (cyborg evo wireless), and a couple of flight sims to try. Want to integrate the stick in the cabinet somehow but don't think it's doable now.

Divers wise, currently I've got dirt3, ridge racer unbounded, gtr, nfs most wanted, and grid, with more planned.

Have added some front USB ports, sockets for 2 play station/ps2 controllers, an artic cooling Accelero twin turbo cooler to the graphics card, an alpine mono sub amp, and a kicker 8" sub tube.

It's getting there slowly.