Pole Position MAME Conversion - Part 1

Starting up my Pole Position MAME conversion. It began life as an original Pole Position upright but it would require a complete internal overhaul to get it to working condition. Due to how problematic these machines are, I gutted it and it was reborn as a classic MAME driving cabinet.

From the outside it looks as if it's a stock Pole Position upright, there are no MAME control panels or extra buttons. All game operations are controlled internally via a keyboard behind the coin door.

The system is a Pentium II 350MHz with 128MB RAM. I'm running DOS MAME v0.56 with a direct boot to DOS under Windows 98SE. Game loading is controlled via batch files in DOS, this basically acts like doing a board swap via software. All control surfaces are interfaced through a single PS/2 mouse hack. The coin mechs are wired to a simple keyboard hack.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Pole
• Position
• MAME
• Arcade
• Cabinet

[hitymzz]

Do you have a website, blog, or instructions detailing how you made the original controls work in mame? It would help me greatly.

[InsaneDavid]

@hitymzz Yeah, under Home Arcade Projects.

[Robobbly]

Were did you get the boot screen

[InsaneDavid]

Look around online for a MAME splash screen for Windows98. I can't remember where I got it but that's how I found it.

[ddurkee0]

I bought a pole position machine with mame. It didn't boot up fully but just needed a new coin cell battery for the CMOS of the pc. The pc is a Dell pentium 133mhz with 32 Meg memory, 4 gig hard drive. I don't have a break pedal. Sometimes the gas pedal stops working, then I need to reboot. Do you have that problem?

All my outrun never allows me to pass the first marker... I always loose! I never played outrun before so maybe I don't play it correctly. Any hints?

Thank you for the video.

[jwnordquist1]

i have one

[jwnordquist1]

easy, the steering wheel is an encoder, using a ball mouse their is 3 encoders x, y, and scroll wheel so you just replace the encoders in the mouse into wires that then hook up to the encoder of the steering, gas, and brake

[InsaneDavid]

I intended on using Game Launcher but this mobo just didn't like it. It only seemed to run anything nicely after sitting in DOS with nothing running for a couple moments.

[RetroRepair]

@CoolDudeClem I think for the age of the games this cab is running, this is more than adequate. A nicer DOS frontend might be better than batch files though.

[retromamez]

Nice!..I've just done a similar project with Chase HQ check out my video's

[cgratton]

How do you convert a mouse to a steering wheel?

[TreyRust]

awesome!! I got the idea to build a mame machine... a bit different from this... but really close...

but I did not like the idea of booting to windows then opening the mame emulator... so I figured installing dos and having it bootup mame automatically would be the way to do it to make it feel more seamless... I youtubed it... and found this! awesome!!

another idea I had was to wire the coin machine to the enter key of the keyboard, so that when you put a coin in it, it hits enter...