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Reg's Second MFME Cabinet


Reg
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Over two years ago I started a journey building a cabinet, this is the thread - this is the journey and pretty much how it ended...

...there was never going to be another cabinet - this was it - done and finished.

Today I was looking at eBay, you know the site like Hot UK Deals where you don't want anything and then you end up buying stuff that you never knew you needed.

I then saw this...

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Sweet mother of god, this would be ideal to turn into an MFME cabinet - shit - it almost was one already.

I had some experience of this kit following a touch screen  conversion I did of something else they made...

...so being the insane, mad person I am - I made an offer for it and they accepted.

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The plan this time around for the cabinet is much easier - firstly I will get MFME up and running on a PC inside of it.

The touchscreen will be used soley for the games - hell - at the end of the day we have so may great DX's now and they've all got to buttons on the screen you are simply enhancing the games within the cabinet.

The buttons will be replaced from left to right at present with navigation and control buttons for the cabinet not sure what or how yet but easy operation for selecting games and volume control as well as shuting down system.  One will be a shift button to give the rest of the buttons dual functions.

When that is all done and fully working I will then see if it's possible to use the coin mech that is already present and the hopper - at the end of the day this setup is pretty much fit for swapping the PC and doing a few connections and done.

For the top bezzle I'll get some custom artwork done saying MFME and then a guide to the extended buttons on the cabinet.  It'll look something like this.

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The most expensive part is going to likely be the bezel work that needs to be done and then getting that professionally printed and enscased in a custom size acrylic.  That will then be fixed in the area below marked in red.

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This is how I would hope a bezel would end up - imagine the rectangle dimensions with the break out area for the keys and legneds - you get the idea !

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Going to be a couple of weeks before the cabinet arrives but this is going to work well ( I hope )...

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Talk about dropping on, thats a nice bit of kit and will look nice going on your taste for excellence. The touch screen is great idea only thing is i would miss the jumping of the gamble button or the rapid/hard beating of the start button when the layouts are eating my money. 😂  Joking apart this will turn in to something nice and be the envy of most fme fans.

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Yeah - the buttons I am thinking of based on what you say about the start button.

From left to right in terms of function not key strokes as you can shift the buttons to have duel functions as I did on my original cabinet.

1. Shift

2. Exit Layout
    Shutdown Machine

3.  Full Screen
     Full Screen Max

4.  Mute
      Insert £1 ( if the coin mech and note acceptors are not wired up )

5.  Up
     Volume Up

6.  Down
      Volume Down

7. Start
    Enter

These cabinets are also likely to appear on eBay again and not be too hard to get so I think this time around as others may want to do it, like this...

...I will 100% docuement the build from end to end.

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Costs

This post will be a live post in this thread - I'll edit it as I go so we can see the real cost of what this costs to build.

£360 for the cabinet, the offer was accepted for that.

£ 50 delivery charge.

£ 30 marquee holder.

£ 50 marquee holder V2.

£ 25 hopper anc coin mech - second hand from kind member on here.

£20 LED kit from Amazon.

£10 Misc bolts and brackets.

£40 maequee holder V3.

£40 IPAC Controller.

£30 Misc Amazon items such as USB cables and audio leads.

Total

£ 655

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Fantastic, recently I bought myself a Microsoft Surface and have been using that to play some layouts on ther emulator, which got me to looking at costs of touch screens.

Current thinking was look at a 24 inch touchscreen and build a second cabinet around that.

Didn't even know they made these things, this stands my plan on its head. Looking forward to seeing what you do with it.

 

Pete

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  • 2 weeks later...

Tonight I mad a choice about the marquee which has now cost £30 to do.

The one risk I have with this is I might change buttons and it's a lot of work to get the marquee changed time and time again so I need flexibility where I am looking to show navigation buttons and this is where I thought of menu holders.

The measurements for the top panel are 41cm x 24cm.  I am not going to go with a curved top it will be rectangle.  Below is a typical menu holder.

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If I get two sheets of custom cut acrylic and seal the left, right and bottom sides, I can make it so that the marquee can drop in the top like below.

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The final touch will be the rounding of the corners of the acrylic so it looks nice.

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For this work I have used https://www.sheetplastics.co.uk and when the sheets arrive I have to do the following.

  1. Put a small spacer on the left, right and bottom of it.  Think clear piece of plastic giving just enough height to slide in a marquee.
  2. Glue it all together - superglue will be fine.
  3. This will be so light it can safely be mounted over the "Bank Job" area on the cabinet and be fit for any marquee to go in there and also allowing change.

For the design I have used @A:E to help here.  Those costs will not be shown as that is external from the "cabinet build" and part of the nice bits and it's unfair to quote the work here as if somebody else does this, their needs would be different and personal to them that is again - a different amount of time and effort.

ETA for the acrylic is 9 days.

Good to get rolling with this now... :Yes:

 

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This idea would need an mfme change but I’m 95% certain that the hoppers, coinmech and note acceptor will be cctalk. Wonder if Chris could add an option for an external serial port to be set up as the cctalk bus? Then all cash handling would work with minimal wiring. 

It’s not a trivial job to program but when I have been stripping mpu5 t7 cabinets I have found a board that converts the standard rs232 signals to cctalk levels or I know you can get coin mech programmers that do a straight usb to cctalk. 

The theory for the payout is already in there for parallel devices but pretty much every cabinet out there that is prime for conversion is going to have cctalk somewhere and you will be looking at at least another 100-150 to convert it back to parallel just for the three parts needed 

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On 19/10/2019 at 07:30, Gary said:

The theory for the payout is already in there for parallel devices but pretty much every cabinet out there that is prime for conversion is going to have cctalk somewhere and you will be looking at at least another 100-150 to convert it back to parallel just for the three parts needed 

Yeah indeed - however in fairness - this may not be such a big job IF I can find the equal parts.  I am not too worried about the note acceptor on this, it seems bust.  Although powers up it does not take anything and I do have a couple of old £5 notes I kept as well.

I do worry tho - I don't think they didn't the Compact Hopper MkII in a parallel version.

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11 hours ago, Reg said:

Yeah indeed - however in fairness - this may not be such a big job IF I can find the equal parts.  I am not too worried about the note acceptor on this, it seems bust.  Although powers up it does not take anything and I do have a couple of old £5 notes I kept as well.

I do worry tho - I don't think they didn't the Compact Hopper MkII in a parallel version.

All the barcrest Genesis MPU4 machines and most of the early MPU5 used a parallel compact hopper so you should have no problems there

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CONVERSION - PART #1

01. Using a spare PC I found, I installed Windows 10 and setup to login automatically ( basically no password for the default user ).

02. The monitor for this turned out to be a 3M Touchscreen.  The drivers were MT7.14.9.Win32-64.zip and these were downloaded from here...

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/touch-systems-us/resources/3m-touch-drivers-and-kernel-patches/

03. The drivers were installed and the option to use HTD Mouse was picked.

04. Direct X9 Run Time was installed.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8109

05. MFME was installed.

06. For a test, the DX from @Tommy c was used.  This was edited before moving to the cabinet to drag the borders of the layout as close to the playfield as possible.

07. MFME was set to lauch the game in full screen, I think I picked full screen max.

08. Below is a video so far - this is very rough and ready - just testing the touchscreen actually worked.  Ignore the flashing buttons they're still hooked up to the original PC.

Off out now - but stage one - proof of concept that this actually is going to work - done. :Yes:

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2 hours ago, Tommy c said:

Looks cool that does,how come the reels spin fast as anything on that,on my pc there no werw near that fast,

I have no idea. :(

All I can say is the PC is clean apart from MFME, there is nothing really else installed on it and it's a fresh install.

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4 hours ago, Tommy c said:

Looks cool that does,how come the reels spin fast as anything on that,on my pc there no werw near that fast,

 

1 hour ago, Reg said:

I have no idea. :(

All I can say is the PC is clean apart from MFME, there is nothing really else installed on it and it's a fresh install.

Mine spins as fast as Reg, if it helps, my PC Specs bought Oct 2015, so 4 years ago, are I7- 5820k @ 3.30 Ghz , 16gb Ram, GTX 980ti.

MFME is installed on a separate SSD from my windows installation, but there are other files on the drive as well. It's an old style SSD, not the newer M2 motherboard type. If it matters my operating system is installed on an M2 SSD.

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1 hour ago, A:E said:

Oooh, touchscreen ;)....

The only trouble with touch screen buttons is that long term it's not a comfy way to play fruit machines.   You kind of need two screen, the bottom monitor at a comfy angle like actual bottom, glass of a fruit machine.

J

I like playing them in vertical mode, on my surface pro, when on the move, but must say, that keyboard/mouse is still the best for me.

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Here is the marquee with some paper shoved in...

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This is it being held in front of the machine.  I'll have to but some black paper behind the marque when it goes in, the Bank Job shines through too much - that's not going to be a problem and was kind of expected.  Besides the lights behind it were a bonus, I never actually thought they were originally there so worst case, I'll just disable those.

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The tale of how to blow money, LOL !

So not excatly 100% happy with how the marquee plastics were coming out - if I had only read the site a little more.

They actually do a black plastic which could be used for the rear sheet and a clear one for the front. They also do screw holes - again I am now reordering.  However based on the preview of the artwork I've seen, I have no choice - my earlier shoddy efforts above would put it to shame.

In other news, I popped the lastest layout from @Pook into the cabinet and recorded a dodgy phone video, game plays lovely in it...

 

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