Probably the biggest
decision when building a MAME cabinet is which monitor to choose.
This decision is more important than your choice of controls because
control panels can be swapped out at a later time. Any monitor (or
TV set) over 19" is most likely going to require two people
to move. Plus, the monitor is going to be in a very tight space
so removing it isn't something you will want to do often. If the
monitor is an arcade monitor then how it is to be mounted in the
cabinet is one of the first decisions you should make.
I originally considered
a 20" computer monitor for this project. First, I already have
one so it wasn't going to be and added expense. Second, I wanted
the higher resolutions for playing vector games. The problem was
that even with a 20" monitor vertical games were going to be
too small for my liking.
I then considered a standard
TV with S-Video. My current graphics card takes an S-Video input
to I gave it a try. I hooked my TV to my computer and played a few
games. Overall, I just wasn't that impressed. Plus, I wasn't looking
forward to mounting a TV set at the angle that I desired for the
cabinet.
D9200
I finally decided on
a Wells-Gardner D9200. This monitor seems to have a very good reputation
in the MAME world and can be hooked to any computer via a VGA cable.
The D9200 is like an arcade monitor and is designed to be mounted
directly to the cabinet frame. The D9200 is a 27" monitor so
the vertical games came out to a decent size. The horizontal games
were larger than their original 19" monitors would display
them but a larger display is more desirable to me than a smaller
one. My main concern with the D9200 was with the resolution is provides.
The maximum resolution for the D9200 is specified as 640x480 which
is plenty for your standard arcade game but not so great for vector
games. I tried running some vector games on my computer monitor
at 640x480 and wasn't very impressed. Some people had reported that
the D9200 handled vector games very well so I took their word for
it and bought the D9200. Well, when the monitor arrived (in a very
big box) I hooked it to my test machine and fired up MAME. Robotron
looked awesome. I tried Asteroids and, well, it looked like crap.
I figured I would just have to give up on the vector games. I had
heard that the ArcadeVGA graphics card and the D9200 make good friends
so I picked up an ArcadeVGA, ran the Avres utility to set the resolutions
for the games, and then fired up MAME again. Robotron looked awesome
again but this time Asteroids and all the other vector games looked
pretty damn good too.
The next issue was designing
the cabinet to hold this monitor correctly. To get the monitor oriented
at 15 degrees I drew a scale drawing of the D9200 schematics in
Adobe Illustrator. This allowed me to rotate the image and overlay
it onto my design to get the rest of the plans in place. Plus I
could print the drawing out to actual size and then use it as a
template for drilling the holes for the mounting hardware.
Click
here for the D9200 Illustrator file
