The cabinet is in fair condition.  The t-molding is missing in a few places and there are a few holes and chips in the wood exterior.  The monitor looks good, after you look at it for a while, you notice that the center of the screen seems to have a large rectangle burned into it. (Perhaps this was from the high score list of Donkey Kong?)  The control panel needs work because the Plexiglas is cracked and some dark liquid got in.  For some reason, player #1 is on the right side!  (This needs fixing ASAP).  The coin door supposedly works, but I haven't tried it with actual quarters yet.  The sound seems to work perfectly.  The buttons and joysticks seem to work good, but the joystick seems to stick sometimes (this could just be the game though, because I'm not too familiar with it...). 

The great thing about this cabinet is that it is small compared to many others.  This allows me to keep it in the house without too much grief from my wife!  Also, that it was converted to Twin Cobra is a good thing because it now has a JAMMA interface board.  This makes connecting it to a PC much easier.  Also, the control panel is easily removable on this cabinet, opening up the possibility of having a few different panels that can be hot-swapped.

Facade

The basic plan is to paint the exterior black (mostly because it will match the room better), rework the control panel, and connect to a PC using the JAMMA interface.

First thing was to find black t-molding (9/16" wide) to replace the original white stuff.  After some searching, I finally found it at www.t-mold.com.  I ordered one 25' piece on 18Mar05 (This was plenty).  Total cost (including shipping) was $16.54.

Control Panel

The really nice thing about this cabinet is that the control panel is removable.  I'm taking advantage of this to make a few different control panels for various games...  The one that came with it is not bad for games that need one or two 8-way joysticks.  But, it's not so good for 4-way joystick games, so I've made a new control panel.  I may make another with a spinner and a trackball.

Getting at the control panel is really easy on this cabinet...  There are two latches on either side that hold it and these can be reached through the coin door.  The first thing I did was to insert two DB-25 connectors (1 male, 1 female) on the wire bundle going to the control panel.  This allows me to have multiple control panels that can be hot-swapped.  The control panel is very basic, just a piece of wood with a Plexiglas cover.    Here's a look at the DB-25 modification:    This is my wiring chart: 

Pin#	Signal	Color		Pin#	Signal	Color
1	Ground	Black		14	2 Start	Grey
2	1 Start	Grey		15	2 Up	Pink
3	1 Up	Pink		16	2 Down	Blue
4	1 Down	Blue		17	2 Left	Green
5	1 Left	Green		18	2 Right	Yellow
6	1 Right	Yellow		19	2 B1	Orange
7	1 B1	Orange		20	2 B2	Red
8	1 B2	Red		21
9				22
10				23
11				24
12				25
13

As you can see, there is room for more wires on the connector, should the need arise.  I also used this opportunity to swap wires, so that player #1 is on the left. 

Computer Hardware

Of course, I happen to have an old motherboard (or two) around...  This one should be good enough:    It's a noname BX31 based Pentium2 motherboard with a 600MHz pentium3 socket 370 CPU installed using a socket 370 to slot 1 adapter board.  It has 192MB of PC100 DIMM memory installed. 

Ok, I've now tried several video cards (AGP, PCI, and ISA) out with mame and they all work for most games. The problem is that none of them worked for vector games...  After scanning the internet, it seems that I needed an ATI Rage Pro card for best compatibility (Or, shell out the $90 for an ArcadeVGA card).  I was going to buy one off Ebay but then I saw one at CompUSA (actually it was a generic CompUSA branded box) for $30.  This is an 8MB ATI Rage Pro card with PCI interface.  I'm pretty happy with it as all games now work and most work well in the vertical orientation also.  Only trouble is that I can't get Windows to run interlaced with this card.

I'm using the JPAC to interface the computer to the JAMMA interface.  It makes life very simple although I think I could have been able to get by without it... 

Computer Software

After looking at a few sites, I decided on Windows98 SE as the OS.  I figured out how to get it to boot just to DOS without starting Windows98 by the info on this page (editing the hidden msdos.sys file).

I spent a lot of time trying to get AdvanceMame to work and finally gave up!

I finally got it going using just the DOS version of MAME.  After a lot of trial and error, I figured out that I need to use these switches to get the games to play right on my vertically oriented arcade monitor (note that I've renamed dmame.exe to mame.exe: 

mame galaga -monitor arcade -ror -soundcard 1 -depth 8

 After playing around with the "arcadeos.cfg" file a bit, I got ArcadeOS going.  I think I like this front end better that AdvanceMame (mostly because I can get it to work!).