Bursar

Yeah, I've seen those. Massively expensive though. It would probably be much more effective to buy an arcade cabinet, rip the innards out and stick a PC inside. I guess you do get what you pay for, but I'm quite enjoying the challenge of building this thing myself. And with my limited wood working skills, it is quite a challenge

The easiest way of fixing that is surely to get some rubber gromits to lessen the vibration.

Installing from scratch is quite straight forward. Any data you want to keep, simply write it to CD or copy it to another hard disk/partiton. Then boot from the WinXP CD. You can pretty much follow the prompts after that. Just make sure you reformat the C drive during installation. You'll be asked to insert the CD for a previous version of Windows, so just do a bit of disk swapping, and then it will carry on. A few minutes later and you'll be sorted. There are also plenty of other posts on this board that deal with fresh installs and upgrades. Your life will be much easier if you can do it. Things will probably only get more and more frustrating if you keep trying to get stuff to work.

It sounds a bit like you're paying the price for doing an upgrade. Can you back up your data wipe the drive and install from scratch? Santa Cruz drivers are at: ftp://ftp.voyetra.com/pub/tbs/santacru/sc_4161s.zip XP also includes drivers for the NEC 1260, so you don't need to download any.

Have a look at this comparisson of a couple of different types: http://www.bit-tech.net/review/136/ The general consensus was that it did help a bit, and that temps went up a bit. At the end of the day it's a compromise between noise and temps (as always). You may be better off getting a baybus or something similar. You can then leave the fans on high power when you're benchmarking or playing games, and turn them down to low power when playing music/films.

I installed it earlier, and it works just fine for me. I haven't actually installed or uninstalled any software since applying SP1, but I get into the Add/Remove Programs list with no problems.

OK, well if you're interested in doing it yourself, here are some links: www.arcadecontrols.com - loads of examples, hints and links to other people that have built cabinets and suppliers of parts. Great message board as well. www.happcontrols.com - supplier of arcade components such as joysticks and buttons. They have a UK office which you can deal direct with if you're in the UK like me. www.ultimarc.com - supplier of the IPAC keyboard encoder to hook the sticks and buttons to your PC. http://home.earthlink.net/~seanhat/arcade/ - detailed plans for a cabinet and control panel. Also templates for joystick and button layouts. These are the basic plans that I'm modeling my cabinet on. www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cpmeasure.jpg - rough measurements of my own control panel. Have fun

More progress... I've cut out the control panel again (from MDF rather than the nasty chipboard) and have also cut out the two side panels for the cabinet. http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/side1.jpg Now it's starting to look cool and I'm getting quite excited. The weather has been a bit changeable today, so I'm not sure how much I'll get done tonight or over the weekend, but it shouldn't be long before I have all the parts cut. Then it's the joyful task of figuring out the best way to bolt it all together and what colours to paint it

I went from a P3 1GHz with a GF3 and 512MB PC133 RAM to a P4 1.6GHz and 512MB RDRAM (all the other components stayed the same). The speed increase is very noticable actually It's definately a worthwhile thing to do. But then my upgrade was a freebie Shhhh! Games are much smoother, and I can run in much higher resolutions than I used to. The machine is going to get another upgrade very shortly, but only a small one to either a 1.7 or 1.8GHz P4. If there's anything else in particular that you want to know, just ask.

Quote: Quote: The machine is going to get another upgrade very shortly, but only a small one to either a 1.7 or 1.8GHz P4. Have you tried to overclock? I have no direct hands-on experience with the P4 family yet... can your existing 1.6 be pushed higher? Is this a Pentium IV?? Nope, no overclocking for me. One of the banes of free upgrades is that I get little say in the components. This typically means I get Intel mobos. Whilst they're generally rock solid, they don't have the performance options that other motherboards have. Still, I'm not complaining. I'd rather have my PC running at stock speeds and doing it without crashing than trying to squeeze out the last few MHz and suffering crashes. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against clocking at all, my AMD machine is clocked. But it took a fair amount of trial and error to find the sweet spot between where the machine ran happily without crashing, and where it would fall over if you pushed it too hard. With the performance leaps that have been made recently (both in terms of CPU and GPU power), I think the appeal of overclocking has waned slightly. Yes there will always be people who want to be the first to push their P4 to 3GHz (or whatever the next highest speed will be), but for general use, there isn't a huge amount of point anymore. But that's going slightly O/T

Have a look at www.34sp.com Reasonable rates, and they don't charge you for going over your bandwidth limit until you've reached about 1GB, and then they start charging. For a personal site, this is extremely unlikely to happen. For professional sites, you'd probably want a higher disk space/bandwith limit anyway. They have cgi/php/mysql/frontpage running, so you should be able to do pretty much anything you want. If you don't want something, just ask them to turn it off for you They also have a full web based interface for administering the site/databases/users and viewing the stats of your site. They do have SMTP servers available at extra cost, otherwise you can just use your ISP servers. You'll have to toss up and see if the cost outweighs the benefits. Email is also available via a web interface, and you can configure extra users and give them their own address. Pretty much everything on your site counts towards your disk quota, so that's the database, email, web pages etc. A pretty good company, quick and efficent, and based in the UK

I was always under the impression that not having a page file on your boot disk would cause Windows to inform you that it won't be able to create a dump file, and that the feature would need to be disabled. Given that the dump files aren't that useful to most mortals, turning them off shouldn't represent much of a problem. Maybe MS figured that we really shouldn't be turning them off, and despite many people not being able to comprehend them, we should all give up valuable disk space for them

Thanks for that. The demo out about a month to 6 weeks ago for the single player, and I think the multi-player demo was released about 3 to 4 weeks ago (which I still haven't gotten around to playing yet). It is a great game, and I'm really looking forward to its release.

Right, that's it, all done http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp11.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp12.jpg Pic cp12 shows my step-daughter and her boyfriend using the panel to play some Puzzle Bobble 2. Once they're done, I may actually get a go on it myself!

I'm a right hander. If you look at most arcade games, they are set up in the same way. If the game isn't too complicated they may have the buttons on both sides of the joystick so that it's ambidextrous, but pretty much every machine has the stick on the left and the buttons on the right.

Yup, it will be a PC running Win2K and Mame 32. I also have a few other emulators so I can run SNES games, and a couple of other games that aren't in Mame such as Killer Instinct, Ridge Racer and Rave Racer

Quote: P.S. I was also not able to access the the nvidia display properties section as it bombed out whenever I tried to click on the nvidia tab Anyone else experiencing this? See my post just a couple above yours for the solution

Quote: Odly the driver chrashes to the desktop when I click the ti4200 tab in the display properties advanced window, Infact it chrashes to the desktop too with the nview properties in the control panel. I had exactly this problem with my GF3. All you need to do is completely uninstall the drivers via Add/Remove programs, and then reinstall them after a reboot. That should sort you out As for other tools, I've used NVRefreshTool to set my refresh rates. I must admit that I haven't tried any games since setting the resolutions, but it didn't throw up any errors. I haven't tried any overclocking tools yet though.

Not strictly true. There was a site called Free Loader (or something like that) and once you signed up, you earnt credits on their site, and you could download games from their site for free. GTA2 was one of the games on offer. The games were custom versions though, and there were strong warnings across the site saying that if you downloaded the games, you had to apply patches to the games from the Free Loader site. Using patches for the normal retail version of the game would kill it. I didn't actually get around to trying any of the games offered for download via the site, so I don't know if they were full versions or maybe cut down ones.

I'd hold back on the true craftsman comments until I've completed it

Quote: * Just like "old-times"... I bet you could market that once you get the initial design down into your template & finalized off the prototype! (DO think about that... I know plenty of folks that might get into that, wealthy ones that do gaming!) APK Heh, the problem is that shipping a cabinet (even in flat pack form) will cost an arm and a leg. Besides, there are plenty of other people that have built cabinets and the plans are freely available on the web. There are also companies that supply prebuilt cabinets that are made to professional standards. If you're interested, take a look round www.arcadecontrols.com Have a good look through the Examples section. You'll see that hundreds of others have done the same thing that I'm planning

Already have a couple of pics of the basic layout of the control panel: http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp1.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp2.jpg Players 1 and 2 stand in the middle. Players 3 and 4 on the outside edges. This means you're fairly centered when playing single or double player games (which will be most of the time). Players 3 and 4 will only have 4 buttons each and not the full 6 that you can see on the paper templates. Above each players buttons are a start and 'insert coin' button. Along the back edge will be extra buttons to control the software (pause, menu, save and load, Exit and so-on). Shouldn't be too long before I have something a bit more substantial to show

Not exactly a remake, but Gauntlet went 3D in the arcades with Legends and Dark Legacy. I haven't played them but they look quite fancy. The BattleZone game (as mentioned in that article) was essentially a new game but with slight hints of the original. It sounds as if Defender will be similar. Some of the playing aspects are the same, but really it's going to be a whole new game. I think most 80's arcade games were left pretty much as they were if they made the transition to PC/console. Take Bubble Bobble for instance. I loved this game (still do), and the key is in the game play. Changing it to 3D or up[censored] the game significantly would make it something other than Bubble Bobble and I probably wouldn't be as interested in it. I take it you're familiar with MAME and a whole host of other emulators that let you play those classic arcade games on your PC? And on that subject, I'm actually building a full sized 4 player arcade cabinet It's going to house a PC running various emulators hooked up to a fairly large monitor. I have the electronic bits to interface the joysticks and buttons to the PC, and the sticks and buttons themselves should be arriving in a day or so Authentic 4 player Gauntlet and button mashing Street Fighter II will soon be mine!! :D:D Edit -> I see you know about MAME. When I started typing this, there weren't any replies to the thread, and then my boss came in for a chat, and by the time he left, 3 other replies had appeared after I hit the submit button.

Some manufacturers also bundle it with their hardware. I got a version of it my with Epox mobo

Have you made any changes to your network configuration? IIS under Windows 2000 requires that the MS Networking components are installed. I haven't really played with IIS under XP, but I suspect that requirement is still present. Double check your network settings and see how you get on.