Pole Position MAME Conversion - Part 2

Playing a quick game on 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

[cgratton]

Will it play Turbo (Sega)?

[InsaneDavid]

No, Turbo is a glutton for CPU power compared to the other games - it crawls on the setup. In addition MAME v0.56 didn't run it very well.

[royalficuscinema]

@InsaneDavid yeah buddy. i never crash and never go below 160 on turn 4 or go off the course. besides turn 4, im constantly going 195. my record is 63,590. moneypowerrespe is a total NOOB

[brettv8]

Try hacking your play station wheel and pedals and wiring into a sega rally cabinet, good solid controls and a bit of mucking around but worth the effort. Done it with an xbox and it works a treat!

[gtq838]

I'll upload a video of mine... I tried the main thing and decided to just put a multicade board in another cabinet I had and install a playstation 2 in the pole position cab attached to a 21inch crt television...

I plan on hooking up a ps2 steering wheel and gas pedal to make it play like an arcade game with any ps2 racing game.

[InsaneDavid]

It's just a standard PC monitor. Eventually I'll replace it with a slightly bigger one.

[gtq838]

what type of monitor? tv? pc? or standard arcade?

[InsaneDavid]

3 laps in and 65,000, huh? You're either not playing the authentic arcade version or have the DIP switches set to make the game far too easy. Try playing the game while holding a camera in one hand. The world record is 67,310 - my high is 59,880 and I complete the race almost every time on default factory settings.

The only thing you have the high score in is being full of crap.

[hayabusafmw]

can you post pictures of your machine when you were doing the convertion? im interested in seeing step by step if you took some :)

also what is your website?

[InsaneDavid]

I actually bought it off a craigslist ad from a guy that lives a couple blocks down the street from me. It was in rough condition internally, which is why I converted it to run MAME.