Ok, The whole idea behind this, was to get more use of the mame cabinet, and also to give me 2 different projects. And of course to have computerized scoreboard that played sounds for goals and to announce the winner.

 1.) a welding project

 2.) programming project  (program available for download)

I have had a foosball table for several years, I went cheap to see if we would play with it.  Growing up with my 2 brothers, we would go to the local boys club and play foosball and pool, so I knew I liked to play.  But would my daughters like to play also, or even company that came over.  I purchased a 150 dollar foosball table from sears, made by Harvard.  Great investment, we use it alot.  Anyway, it would have been worth it to go with a 500 dollar table I believe.  So, the table had ball bins at each end of the table,

I removed this and put in a flat piece of 22 gauge steel, to cover the existing hole and proceeded making the new ball bin

The main tube is 2 inch electical conduit and the flat stock was 22 gauge steel, cut and bent as needed.  I am actually a decent welder, but that is just super thin material, so I just tacked it in several places. (In the above picture, the table is upside down, and that is the bottom of the goal. and the tube runs downhill to a ball cup in the middle of the table for easy access to the player.

Then I had to do the hard part, make a holder for a micro switch (Happ arcade button switch) plus make it work.  It is basically  more 22 gauge flat steel, welded to the side of the tube with 3 holes cut in it, 2 to hold the switch, and one to hold the actuator.  I also had to cut a 1/4" slot about 2 inches long in the bottom of the tube so the actuator could be struck by the ball as it moved through the tube.  the key to making the switch work was to make the actuator long enough to counter balance off the switch.  My first attempt did not do this and I was getting multiple points for each time a score was registered.  So make sure the actuator does not rest on the switch button.

Here is what the total assembly looks like when assembled

Ok next problem, how do you get the wires from the table to the Mame cabinet.  I thought long and hard on this one.  Being in the basement, you have free reign of the ceiling.  So I could run the wires along that, but for the ability of cleaning around under or moving the table, you would want it to quick disconnect and get out of the way.  So I needed the ability to run 4 wires back to the control panel of the Mame cabinet.  I came up with 50' 6 conductor phone cord with a phone jacks on both ends. (check out the back of the control panel for that end of it.  I painted the phone jack black to match the rest of the table.  Looks neat and clean and is easy to disconnect if I need to move the table.

The next problem was programming, This was my first windows program I have ever written.  I have been programming for about 20 years though.  I hate to mention I started programming in 7th grade on an apple IIe and a commodore 64. 

Ok, the program had to take input from the ipac as keystrokes, check to see if a new game had started, check to see if the game was over, keep score, minus a score if the ball was placed in the wrong goal (gimme) and play sounds on each score.  To most, very simple, to me it was a relearning process.  The program was written in Visual Basic 5.0 so it will work with windows 95 and up,  here is a screenshot of the final program.

It works great. I have since then, modified the program to allow play of the foosball table, ping pong and the pop-a-shot basketball game also, all at the same time.