MAME

[dullivan]

I'm starting one that's near and dear to FatherTom's heart. I've starting cobbling together a pile of parts to build my own MAME cabinet. I've got an old laptop I'm going to dedicate to the project (which im actually playing Super Mario RPG on right now), some speakers, and I recently went out and bought an old cocktail cabinet from craigslist. It has two trackballs, actually works, and only cost me $40. Pretty good deal eh? I'm going to use some of the guts from that (mainly a trackball. buying one of those online costs more than what I paid for the whole cabinet usually) and buy an upright cabinet for the actual cabinet itself and monitor. What I'm wondering at this point is how to attach the monitor that's going to be in the upright cabinet to my laptop. I know the old arcade monitors required their own circuit board that hooked to the PCB board for the game, but how do I simply connect it to a monitor out or s-video jack instead?

EDIT: I'm testing the edit feature! To continue my question, would it be easier to just slap a TV in the monitor hole in the cabinet and be done with it? I've got one I can use. Are the old arcade monitors easily sell-able online? I wouldn't think you can ship them, and I live out in the woods, so that's a big consideration.

[ften]

In my opinion arcade monitors and cards are to expencive, I'd just go with S-video and a normal CRT if you want to give it a retroish look.
-FTen

[dullivan]

Explain "expensive". I've already got a monitor (bigger, newer, nicer one coming with my new cabinet I'm buying next month) and a really old card, which I'm not sure will work with the bigger, newer, nicer monitor or not. what's the cost in both $ and time for hooking one of those boards to my laptop guts?

[ften]

http://www.ultimarc.com/avgainf.html for 15Khz monitors, 87 bucks. other wise you can rigg something