Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME building a cocktail table, question

Honestly, it's not purist, but after seeing the Ultracade box at Costco, I'd recommend getting a flatscreeen - but ONLY if the viewing angle is right. 19" flatscreens go for $199 now on lots of sites like tigerdirect.com. (My only caution on the angle is that you need to hope that the viewing angle is good enough for sitting on the side.)

But as vitaflo said, go to byoac.com. Lots of history and lessons learned on the various project places.

On the heat, it seems to me that some flatscreens use thermal cooling, so putting a fan in _might_ be nice anyway.

As for computers, you can fit a mac mini in easy, or, I've been considering building a barebones x86 system with components after seeing one at an arcade auction.

I think a flatscreen would have issues at that angle on a cocktail. And R. Belmont is right, a TV will go to crap if you mount it vertical. If you really don't want to use an arcade monitor the best bet would be a computer monitor, and even then I'm not sure about vertical mounting.

Space for a computer shouldn't be a problem. Nothing says you need a case. I my arcade I have the mobo screwed into the wall and the power supply and hard drive mounted to the floor of the cab. Works great and lets you put various pieces where they fit instead of all in one spot.

ok, well learning this, I might just go for a normal upright. Now to talk the wife into it.

CRT displays are made for the heat to exchange out the top of the case. It is pretty easy to see how mounting them with the screen pointing up would be a problem.

As far as the viewing angle for flat panels go, that shouldn't be an issue - most panels these days (especially ones made as TVS) have viewing angles of 170 degrees in both directions. Here is a sample:

http://secure.syntaxgroups.com/products/specs.jsp?pid=lt26hve

ok, back to the cocktail idea. What do you guys think of this monitor http://www.betson.com/products/IMP-44-4019-01
Would this work in the cocktail table, would I need the breakout cable? I know I would need the arcadevga card. How much would the shipping be?

Thanks

Seriously man, try the forums at Arcadecontrols.org. A few of us here are active there... and they REALLY know their stuff.

One thing you want to remember with cocktails is that the monitor needs to have a neck short enough to fit in a machine that only stands a few feet off the ground. Easy you say??? Depends on how you plan on mounting your computer, and the size and shape of the cocktail you plan on building. A lot of the original cocktail cabs had very small monitors.

Anyway besides reading through the THOUSANDS of detailed posts and FAQ on this same subject at the forums at arcadecontrols.org you can read this book;

PDF version of the book

Regular version

It has answers to many of your questions as well, and you can refer to it while you are building your project.

I will post there, I was waiting for my account to be activated. Thanks

But the vector emulation won't look very smooth on an arcade monitor, would it?

Looks fine actually. My arcade monitor can do 800x600, which looks pretty good for vector games, so I have all of them run at that res.

If your arcade monitor only can do 15khz low res, then yeah it'll look like crap.