Lagertop

On mine the white interface is actually a serial port connection (9 pin), pretty much every PC I've ever seen has a serial port on the motherboard so it will interface fairly easily, in your case it could be that the motherboard does not have a serial port protuding out the back but requires something like this attaching to pins on the mobo itself.

Extension

Also without opening my case up I think it was a 3M Microtouch controller which has an XP driver and software over here somewhere:-
http://solutions.3m....eenControllers/

It installed no problem on XP and the calibration software works fine. The only annoyance is that it does not work with MAME touchscreen games very well (Megatouch collection) and that really bugs me as I also have a Megatouch which uses exactly the same touchscreen controller

A thing to note is that the controller on my machine also needed hooking up to the PSU on the PC with a 4 pin molex.

Carnage, there's a trade off if you go the route I took, you gain the ability to customise the frontend and games etc but you lose the ability to use the coin mech and payout. Also the games you have in all likelihood would not work and you would have to find some more.
Considering most people use free play anyway and the coin slots are a novelty it seemed like a good trade for me.

I changed out the PC for a more powerful one and then the trick to it is the software:-
Windows XP install
Quicksheller - It hides Windows XP very well
Custom boot image for Quicksheller
Custom Wallpaper (Millionaire screenshot)
Custom Rainmeter skin to select which machine to play on the millionaire screen
SimpletouchFE is the menu selection system to pick which game to play.
Rocketdock (hidden mode) to access XP functions when needed.

As a project it took no more than 2 or 3 days once I decided to go that way, the best place for learning about that sort of stuff if your nto familiar with it is over at BYOAC.

BYOAC

Hi Lagertop,
I've been playing with the idea of a better pc and even purchased the seprate IO boards of ebay to see if i can still have full coin functions (The PC mine came with has the IO stuff built onto the board).
I haven't touch it in ages (work getting in the way and the missus getting ticked of ).

Your frontend looks really nice. I use HyperSpin on my homemade arcade machine and was gonna (try) adapt that to work for the SWP games.

But I think i'm sold on the one you've got!!!

Could I pick your brains on something.... When I load WordUP the monitor can't handle the resolution. Is there a way around this or is this game a no-go?

Thanks for your help

Word Up runs at 800x600 I believe (there's a sub folder in there called 800600) as do quite a lot of games, I decided therefore to put Windows at 800 x 600 so the monitor would not be constantly switching resolutions. Luckily Simpletouch is scalable down to that resolution.

BTW I needed a dual core for the front end due to the 9 .avi files playing at once, fortunately I had a spare as it maxed out my original P4 2.4Ghz. I could have went the .bmp route but the .avi's make it more like a pub machine

Thank you all for your help!!

Cliff C that is fantastic thanks very much!! I won't go crazy just a few things to get me started (I've just signed up)

I have bought a Who Wants to be a millionaire kit from Ebay (I will not give in easily!!)

Once again thanks again for your help so far.

Regards

Darren

LemmingMad I am not sure if your still around but I have had similar issues, I picked up a Gamebox on Ebay and after 3 fruitless days of trying to get the software/hardware to work I gave up and decide to go to an XP install and use existing games I already had rather than the ones supplied on the 2 HDD's/Discs and dongles.

Essentially I ripped all of the hardware out and put in a mid-range PC with XP on it and downloaded the touchscreen driver.



I then hid XP using Quicksheller and built up a front end using a mixture of Rainmeter and Simpletouch for the games.





I toyed with the idea of trying to interface with coin mech and hopper but decided it wasn't worth the effort as I would need to:-
Buy an interface card ie IPAC from Ultimarc or some such (I have a couple but they are in use)
Work out how to attach it to the coin payout hopper using a relay and PSU.
Get the coin mech working and talking to the PC.
Write some code to control all of this.

It was probably a bit beyond me but anyhow it works fine with most of the games I have and nobody can tell its simply XP behind there.

Hello All, I've been reading for a while but finally joined up so I can get some advice.

See you around.