I'm building a MAME cabinet (video game arcade). I've got over 5000 games loaded on this machine. Of course all the old standards will be played: Pac-man, Defender, Asteroids, Dig-Dug, Centipede... but there are a ton of games which I've yet to discover. Very cool little project if I do say so myself...
I got the plans from
[link]
I'm trying to design the marquee (the graphic to be lit up at the top of the cabinet). I'm considering having a contest here on DA for that. I want the image to be a vector graphic (so I can re-size it easily) and I'm just no good at doing vector art.
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Sta.sh
That'll be fun sitting there all day drawing!
I want 1 too when i'll find a better location ^^
I just happen to have a metric fuckton of unused computer hardware (motherboards, at least one processor, stuff like that), so I just might do that too
Hey, is this why you've gotten all silent-like, btw?
I've been quiet ever since my second kid. In fact she's screaming for me right now! This is hard!
1. the guide you link to doesn't seem to specify the software: do you plan on setting some kind of OS (like windows-something), or get some, I don't know, dedicated linux distro? From what I've seen, AdvanceCD looks promising, but I'll have to check whether it can be installed to disk, since I'd like to keep the hardware simple
2. I kind of figured out you don't need to put the entire PC inside, with its case and all: how about fixing some rails to the arcade case for supporting the motherboard and probably the graphics card and some sort of a tray for the HDD?
Also: two kids AND enough time to work on this project? You ubermensch, you
I got an old P4 from work, a friend found me a 21" monitor, and I bougt the joystick controller ( [link] ) The OS is windows XP though you could probably run an older OS if you wanted - maybe using an older version of M.A.M.E.
It didn't take too much time to get the build to this point, perhaps 3 Saturdays or so, during which time my Mom watched my kids (I built most of what you see with my Dad since he has a few better tools than I do...
What you can do is D/L Mame and put it on your main PC. Find some game ROM's (they are copyrighted and illegal to sell, but there are places that will "give" them to you for the cost of the disks and shipping. Lukily a friend of mine bought them that way and I just loaded them onto my PC off of about 15 DVD's.) Once you have MAME and the ROMS you can play the games with your keyboard and see if you want to make the next leap (buying the joysticks) and finally the ultimate leap - building your arcade. At that point you'll want a cool front-end for MAME. There are a couple out there. The one I use now allows me to build favorites lists and easily change games on the fly. Very cool stuff.
I had thought about mounting the MB on the side of the arcade - but there really is no reason to do so. There's a ton of room at the bottom. I have my PC sitting on my sub-woofer. It's actually easier if you don't mount it that way you can upgrade PC's in the future or pull it out whole to do something with it.
I've actually wired in a remote PC start button and tapped into the HD power to power a couple of lights I'm putting in the coin door. It will look real sweet.
Go for it man!
I've found something close: a mediaCenter-like program for launching MAME called gameEx [link] , but for the time being the ROM search is slow as unholiest fuck, I can only hope it'll perform well enough on that ancient arcade-to-be PC of mine. I guess I'm doing something wrong here
So, any games that inspired you to do it (fucking take THAT, Jack Thompson
Me and my more electronically-apt friend have been thinking of buying the parts kit from x-gaming, instead of the full-on controller, hoping to save those 90 bucks in the process. I'll let you know how this goes
You can save "favorite" lists and scroll through them quickly. Good stuff...