Setting me back...

The other day I was remarking to myself how lucky I'd been so far on this project, every potential issue or shabby piece of planning turned into nothing more than little hiccough on my journey to cut-price Mame cabinet glory.

Today, not 5 minutes ago, I blew up my monitor.

I was being an idiot, I have the screen out of it's casing, as you may have seen from pictures in previous posts, and for some reason I decided to try and rotate the whole thing with the power still connected.

I guess if I want to find something lucky about this then the fact that I'm not dead would probably be it.

So it's back to Freegle to find a replacement - I'll probably go back and contact some of the people who I rejected first time around, see if they're still feeling charitable. Needless to say this feels lie a bigger set back than anything that has happened previously.

But anyway.

This all happened because of a conundrum I have regarding the design of my cabinet. 

I'm toying with the idea of spinning my monitor 90 degrees - just to offer that extra bit of authenticity to the many (many) vertical shooters and older games that have made the cut into my Mame selection.

There are pros and cons to this approach, the big (and probably only) Pro is how great V.shmups look.
I wouldn't have believed this to be such a profound difference if I hadn't seen it for myself, so it's tricky to put into words.

The best stat I can offer is that, as the diagram below illustrates, it increases the size of the image size by 37%

The cons are that, for every other genre of game, the screen size is reduced by the same 37%.
Remember that this is 14" screen, when mounted vertically you would have a usable screen size of 6"x7"  - a diagonal measurement of just 9 inches - in which to try and appreciate beautiful games like STUN Runner, Powerdrift, or Street Fighter 3.

It shouldn't really be a question at all, I have far more games suited to a horizontal screen than a vertical one, and as much as a enjoy v.shmups they are not my favourite genre, fighting and old school racing games would both rank higher on a personal genre preference list and both suit a horizontal set up better.

But there is something a little bit special about a vertical screen that is unquantifiable in words and numbers.

So I've devised a third option.

It is feasible that I could mount the entire screen with its PCB inside a cube housing that was removable from the control deck and PC section.
This would allow me to physically rotate the screen to suit whichever game I'm playing at any given time.

This is a great solution in theory, but there are downsides.

The original dimensions for the screen area of the cabinet would have been about H35cm x W38cm.
To create this rotatable arrangement that increases to 40cm in both directions - it's not a massive increase, and the height is the main victim which is preferable to the width.

But, considering what happened a few moments ago, is it worth it?


#Mame #Arcade #Retrogaming