Even though I haven't updated this page in a couple of weeks, I haven't stopped working on my Mame Cocktail machine! I received my I-Pac keyboard encoder in the mail recently and that made me want to get my control panel up and running. I've decided that I'm going to try to make the cabinet as authentic as possible. That is, I don't want to do any modifications that can't be undone. Therefore, for the time-being, I'm going to use the standard Donkey Kong control panel. This would be a far more difficult goal to accomplish without the I-Pac. This nifty little device lets me use a minimum number of buttons to control Mame. The Donkey Kong control panel has 3 buttons: 1 player start, 2 player start, and jump. It also has a 4-way joystick. This will limit greatly the number of games that I can play, but that's o.k. I really only want late 70's early 80's games such as Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Galaga, Pacman, etc... Anyway, with the I-Pac, I can use the 1 player button as a "control" key to control ArcadeOS and Mame. Things like exiting, a/v control, and menus (as well as pause) are programmed into the I-Pac as default, and if I really want to, I can customize the configuration. I wanted to hook up the original Donkey Kong control panels to the I-Pac without modifying them. I made adaptors for both player's control panels from the original headers to standard 9-pin connectors such as those serial ports use. I used a wire-wrap socket and cut the long pins down to size, then soldered the wires from a cat-5 patch cable to each pin. I then soldered the 9-pin connectors on the other end. Next, I mounted the I-Pac in a Radio Shack project box. This protects the I-Pac and will allow me to remove it and/or the controllers easily.
I mentioned that I have two Donkey Kong machines, one that is original, and the one I am converting into a Mame cabinet. Whenever I play my original Donkey Kong machine, I find it rather annoying to have to reach into the coinbox and wiggle my finger around until I can hit the coin switch to get another credit. I decide that there must be a better way. Staying in line with my "no permanent modifications" motto, I decided that I would make the coin return lever work to actuate the coin switch. I tinkered with the coin mechanism for a while before concocting an idea of how to make this work. Here is a picture of my solution, along with a close-up of the switch being activated. It isn't too fancy, and I'm using some really cheap plywood that I happened to have on hand, but it works. In the future I may replace the plywood blocks with plastic, but this works for now. I may even do the same thing to my original Donkey Kong since it will allow my three-year-old daughter to get credits easily.
