My MAME cabinet gets a PC upgrade.

So I’m off work this week finishing off the last room in the house and after applying the last coat of paint on the ceilings yesterday, it was time to do the walls today.  With the first coat completed and little else to be done until it dries, I sloped off to the geek den for a spot of fun. Today, I’m changing out my ageing PC which I currently have in my MAME cabinet for something with a bit more clout. I’ve been working this upgrade during the evenings as well as collecting all of the  relevant  bits and bobs and configuring a few more emulators that I wanted to add to my cabinet – namely, AAE for better vector game emulation, NEO GEO, Sega Model 2, Daphne, a few pinball tables via Future Pinball (for the time being) and ParaJVE for Vectrex emulation……because as you know, the Vectrex is cool.

Processor wise, there’s enough here to upgrade my current emulator frontend – MameWah to the media rich Hyperspin and  have all that eye candy artwork whooshing about.

I’ve also upgraded my Mame set from good old trusty .098 to a more recent .151.

I must say, Hyperspin certainly does look incredibly nice when running on a cabinet.  I’m still on the fence between all this gloss though and a simple gamelist/snapshot static screen but I’ll run with it for a while and see how it goes. I’ve also noticed that my iPac keyboard encoder’s shift function appears to have disappeared in this version of  MAME and so some of my keyboard mapping is a little off. Nothing that can easily be sorted out though.

Here’s a quick looksee so far although apologises for the camera wobble….Amidar seemed the perfect game choice after all this painting 🙂

 

Patching for fun.

Well it’s Saturday night here (actually, it rapidly heading into Sunday morning) but alas, no fun and games for me as I’m at work taking advantage of those precious downtime slots to patch our Windows servers…..yay 😉

To be honest WSUS does most of the work and only requires the occasional prod inbetween cups of coffee so whilst I’m here I thought I’d patch another Microsoft box – but this one should be way more fun to do.

I’m going to softmod an Xbox one console.That’s ‘one’ as in the original ‘one’ and not the new ‘one’. Thanks for that MS!

There’s a few ways of doing this and the internet is full of great tutorials covering them all. The one I’m going to try is the harddrive swap method because yanking IDE cables from live PC’s is so Taboo 🙂

Right, the moment of truth. I’ve got my freshly burnt boot disc I made via NDure based on my xbox firmware version and am about to boot my doner PC prior to swapping over the hardrive.

I got the timing wrong on this first attempt and the boot disk had loaded and timed out before I had chance to swap over the drive, but on the second go I got it right and therefore ran through the process of applying the mod.

All seemed to have gone well and was them able to boot into the alternative dashboard and access my Xbox via FTP. The first job was to backup that all important EEPROM file and then onto prepping the files again (and creating another custom boot disk) to allow me to swap out the original 20gb xbox harddrive for something a bit bigger.

Again, all went well until I tried to lock the drive using xboxhdm on the doner PC. It took me a while to figure it out but it was simply the bios settings on the PC that needed to be changed.

Once fitted into the xbox, I ftp’d some retro gaming fun stuff over to take advantage of all that lovely storage space.

Here’s Hypervision, a Hyperspin styled frontend for MAME.

So….do I go for a spot of Donkey Kong or watch the progress of more SQL updat…….zzzzzzzzz.