feasability of a arcade machine.. no OS

Hardware Discussion Technical

Started by Mr T 87 February 18, 2008 07:01 AM

12 comments, last by d000hg 16 years ago

2,123

February 29, 2008 04:40 AM

Quote:Original post by Mr T 87
It's for a gift for a friend. If I can get the kernel bit sorted then the rest should be easy, I'm gonna build up an arcade style machine around it, the game is already done, i'm just modding it.

There's a better way.

Most arcade cabinet projects rely on the fact that the arcade games being emulated - for those who want arcade perfect emulations; sourcing ROMs is up to you - don't need the most powerful processor or hardware-accelerated graphics. Therefore, they purchase compact mini-ITX form factor motherboards and build around that. They install Linux or Windows on it, then configure them to automatically run MAME. Some of them also start a management daemon/service, so they can connect to and administer the cabinet over the network.

Unless your needs are extremely specialized, this is the most cost-effective way. If you're writing a new game, you can just run that natively on whatever OS you place on your system, or, if you're targeting a specific arcade board, you can run your resulting image under MAME.

Be sure to let us know how it goes.

hplus0603

11,916

March 16, 2008 07:53 PM

If the game uses 3D, then you're in for some trouble, though, because the programming specs for most 3D hardware aren't widely available. AMD is threatening to unleash their specs sometime in the future, but last I checked, you couldn't actually get them all yet.

Thus, you'd have to use some embedded OS that already has 3D graphics drivers. Either Embedded NT with Windows drivers, or linux with the vendor-specific GL implementation would work fine.

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Mr T 87

138

Author

March 16, 2008 08:00 PM

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Quote:Original post by Mr T 87
It's for a gift for a friend. If I can get the kernel bit sorted then the rest should be easy, I'm gonna build up an arcade style machine around it, the game is already done, i'm just modding it.

There's a better way.

Most arcade cabinet projects rely on the fact that the arcade games being emulated - for those who want arcade perfect emulations; sourcing ROMs is up to you - don't need the most powerful processor or hardware-accelerated graphics. Therefore, they purchase compact mini-ITX form factor motherboards and build around that. They install Linux or Windows on it, then configure them to automatically run MAME. Some of them also start a management daemon/service, so they can connect to and administer the cabinet over the network.

Unless your needs are extremely specialized, this is the most cost-effective way. If you're writing a new game, you can just run that natively on whatever OS you place on your system, or, if you're targeting a specific arcade board, you can run your resulting image under MAME.

Be sure to let us know how it goes.

Yes, this is the route i've decided to go. I have my hardware platform without a case at the moment, its just layed on some stools. I've just fdisk'd it and i've decided that i'll be installing linux on it tomorrow, Ubuntu to be exact due to it having quite good driver support and i've used it before. I will have to get the game to run on startup and remove modules that i won't be needing so i can save on memory as the spec of the PC isn't as ideal as i'd like.

Then theirs the administration side of things since I am planning on developing my game i'll need a way to access the files so i can update them.

I'll keep you updated as i go. Keep throwing your ideas at me :)

d000hg

1,208

March 26, 2008 04:45 AM

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Quote:Original post by Mr T 87
Yes, that makes sense. Or maybe if the program was compiled for DOS and run on a machine that booted to dos and had a line like... load game in the autoexec.bat file. Would that be a better solution? easier? Or more problematic?

Have fun writing a bank-switched video memory mode 32-bit graphics subsystem! You know, while the rest of us enjoy linear addressing. [smile]

(You could use Linux and one of those framebuffer extensions instead, might make things a bit easier.)

Can't you just use VESA 2.0? I remember in the good old DOS C++ days you could get linear addressing on the whole framebuffer.

feasability of a arcade machine.. no OS

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feasability of a arcade machine.. no OS

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