I can put away my drill

I think I've finished the physical assembly of the cocktail cabinet. It's a tight space, and I had to go through several drill bits, two CPU, and unhook and rehook the JAMMA wiring harness quite a few times to get it together in a clean and secure fashion. Now let's just hope that when I get to the next stage (Hooking up the J-Pac wiring or JAMMA to PC adapter, or in just plain English, the adapter that connects the arcade buttons and monitor to a computer) everything works without much difficulity.

I still haven't figured out the color palletes to finish my Rom, but I am getting close. A very generous computer programmer out there has agreed to help me get the color palletes edited, so I have confidence that this is going to happen a lot smoother then me playing trial and error, entering random numbers in to a hex code that I do not understand.

Here are some pictures of the cabinet in it's current state, and a screen shot of Pacguy being played in Alpha.

Holy Color Palettes

Who would have thought that something as simple as changing the color in a video game like pacman could be so complex? I had no problem changing the pixel configurations of the sprites using Turaco and the text, but looks like I will be doing my homework and learning a bit of hex in order to change the color palettes so that my figure is not pac-yellow with blue hair. So far the software community has been very helpful explaining all this stuff to a novice such as myself, but it is all still slightly over my head. It will get there, but my hopes are that I leave this process with enough programming knowledge to be able to edit other classic arcade games. Any advice is more than welcome here.

Control Panel

Here is the graphics for above the controls on the underlay. A bit of a spin off the original, but reinvented

A Few Road Blocks

Well..... The cabinet arrived (a few weeks ago sorry for the delayed posting) after several issues with the freight company delivering it to the wrong address, and the construction of this machine is well under way. Everything looks great, however it is not going together as smoothly as one would wish. For starters, I ordered an unassembled cabinet which is what I received though everything was pre-drilled. This would be nice if any of the holes lined up. I spent 4 hours redrilling things and now the inside of this treasure chest of wires looks like the victim of a drive by shooting.

The cabinet is a little too tight to fit the Dell Dimension 4700 that I have as a CPU to run MAME so I decided to remove the motherboard, video, audio, and usb cards, and hard drive from the tower, and mount them too the wall. I did this, but now made a fatal mistake somewhere along the way, and now the machine will not boot up. I think when I was removing the heat sinks from the processor, I bumped something and did some serious damage. I will fuss with it when I later, but if I come up empty handed again, I will either try to find a cheap Shuttle on Craigslist, or just drop my eee inside as the brains of the operation. The latter is probably the best solution though I hate to sacrifice that fun little machine to an existence inside a pressed wood box. Easy come, easy go I suppose.

I still have not figured out how to assign color palletes to specific sprites in Pacman using TURACO. As of this moment, my character (Pacguy) is yellow like pacman, with blue pants and blue hair. Need to fix that. If anyone is savy with hex or can shine some light onto editing colors in Pacman it would be much appreciated.

I have much more work to do. I will take my camera with me next time I go to the studio which should be soon so you all can see pics of what I am getting myself into.