Build Log (Part 7)

It's been three years... time for an update!

• • Within a month of use, the 1/8" glass shattered, and the cabinet went back to the garage.  Whatever you think, trust me: 1/8" is NOT thick enough for cabinet glass!  I replaced it with a sheet of 1/8" clear acrylic plastic.  Cutting this is a different experience, one I didn't do so well on, but it's a heck of a lot safer.  Since then it's held up well, so I'm happy.  It seems to hold scratches more than I'd like though.

  • The 10gb HDD had to go, and preferably before it crapped out and lost my hard-earned setup.  I bought a cheap CF-to-IDE adapter off eBay and a 2gb CF card.  Once again DOS turned out to be a huge mega pain in the butt.  Hours of fiddling, attempting to install the latest FreeDOS, trying out AdvanceMame, black screens, lockups, reboots, etc etc later - oh the hell with it, I just gave in and cloned the 10gb drive over to the 2gb card, since it was at least a working setup.  I did manage to pull in a few improvements though: recompiled DosMAME for Athlon with a couple bugfixes, and a few new ROMs, notably Atari Cocktail Tetris!

  • Pulled most of the RAM out, leaving just 128mb.  This prevents me from loading some of the largest ROMs (Rockn' Tread series, Tenkomori Shooting) - you know, the stuff that doesn't run on the cabinet anyway.  Journey still plays despite the 49mb .wav sample, so I'd say I have enough now.  The rest is going to a different board for a different project.