I wrote about starting to set up a Linux box for the sole purpose of running MAME almost a year ago on alt.games.mame. See this article to see how far I got (or didn't get). Now I'm back on that project again since I'm setting up a fifth MAME cabinet (with a vertical oriented monitor), and quite possibly a sixth (horizontal) soon. All the previous ones have been all Windoze based. Since I messed with this so long ago, I've forgotten half of what I did to get what I barely got...

Finally got around to testing out a Centipede board I got for cheap. Did a bunch of searches and found lots of people making JAMMA adapters but no real details. Decided to just "go for it" and clipped power to the marked test points on the board. For the video I didn't have a smaller edge connector so I followed the pins back to components on the board and clipped onto those. Flipped it on waiting for something to smoke and it came right up! For the video, the yellow clip is...

Replaced the transistor and that didn't quite fix the slingshot. The 7404 upstream from it had gone bad too. Popped out the 7404 and put in a new socketed one and the slingshot is working fine now.

When it came in it had 3 problems: weak right flipper, left flipper sticks in the up position, and the right slingshot wouldn't work. Popped it open and found that the weak flipper was caused by someone hooking up the EOS switch across the thick wire part of the coil. They also did it to the left one. Swapped the EOS to the thin wire and that fixed it. The coil stop on the left flipper broke off and had been reattached with a screw. The screw gets magnetized when the coil is energized and...

Haven't yet been able to figure this one out. The player stats on the side have lots of funky colors. The messages in the game are blue instead of white. Also the high score table has all the wrong colors for the text. When I put the game into self-test the screen turns red instead of white, and a RAM error is displayed but I can't read it because the text is black on a black background. Once I skip past the RAM error, all the self-tests come up fine, including the correct colors on the...