I have now hauled the thing upstairs to my game room. Then I began the process of installing the guts. It seems to be a fad with builders to use your Air Hockey table as a staging area for anything and everything that gets done in the game room. Well this game room is no exception. I stacked everything I intended to put into the cab on the air hockey table. Soon enough it all made it’s way onto the floor to the point where no one could walk through there. I eventually would get so frustrated with the mess that I would stop everything and clean the whole place just to repeat the cycle again.
There are just far too many distractions. I got sucked into writing a bunch of stuff on the BYOAC WIKI which took a few weeks. Then there is church. I go to it, and am involved there. I do sound for them, and am also in a men’s bible study which takes time. Kids, and family take time (actually they have to come first). So many times, I planned to work on the cabinet and something would come up with the family. I have gotten in too much trouble for letting the cab come first. The cab became an obsession. There really is a sickness that sets in when you start to see progress. You get excited and want to work on it that much more. I have been late to work (on more than a lot of occasions) because I just wanted to finish just one more thing.
Somewhere in the flow of things I went to two arcade auctions and bought some stuff. This side tracked me because most games from auctions require some TLC. Plus, I have been repairing some machines that a friend of mine bought.
I have been totally side tracked by the front end dilemma which I suppose is part of it all, so perhaps it is not a side track. There are so many great choices, but I am trying to find the right fit based on features I want and need. Once this thing was able to produce a picture, I have been modifying and tweaking and trying to learn how to make MAMEWah, PowerMAME, PowerMAME32, Atomic FE, and Dragon King work. They all have their cool sides. Once I got my head wrapped around MAMEWah the others seemed easier to play with, but trying to understand the bugs of each…well. The pictures that you will see in a little bit are shown with AtomicFE.
I have been desperately trying to use PowerMAME because of the 49 way joystick support and the LED stuff (not to mention many other cool things). In fact I bought so much of the gear based on the idea of using PowerMAME. I also like MAMEWah because of the it could use the quickres utility which changes the resolution based on what game is being played. I have to figure out a resolution solution outside of MAMEWah. It seems that MAMEWah uses the resolution info to pass to MAME but it does not change what MAME wanted to do if it is set to auto res. When I am in PowerMAME32 I can not seem to get a good resolution setting on anything. The combination of the GGG (Groovy Game Gear) LEDWiz with the GGG ICE buttons work fantastic together. I have gotten many beautiful colors out of the RGB LEDs. They are nice and bright in a lit room, and are just over the top in a dark room (in a good way).
I still want to figure out a better way of programming animations for the LEDWiz. Being a video editor / animator, I am frustrated by the LEDWiz interface. In After Effects you have total control over all aspects of your objects. In the LEDWiz app you are fairly limited in ability. No don’t get me wrong. I love the app (as it is the only graphical way to program the thing) and I have done some very nice stuff with it. Again, I wish it was just easier to use.
I am really leaning towards Atomic Front End because Youki is adding LEDWiz and 49 way support. I still have not been successful with getting it fully running But Youki has offered fantastic support. I am getting to a point where though not totally finished, I feel I can work on the config of this thing to get it totally playable soon.
Right now in order to play it at all I am using PM32 with is nearly blinding to look at on a CGA monitor at 640 x 480. but that is the only to see everything I need to see if I go into menus n such.
