MAME arcade cabinet

[mattykins]

Whatsup everyone! I figured I would make a topic about this just to let you guys know what i'm up to etc. I'm still devoting time to my Life Sim project however i'm also building a MAME Arcade cabinet!

For those of you who don't know MAME stands for:Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

In other words you can play games that you would normally have to go to an arcade to play, through an emulator.

I'm converting an old PC of mine to a MAME arcade cabinet. So basically i'm building an Arcade cabinet out of MDF wood and plexiglass etc and putting my pc and a monitor inside if. Wiring arcade buttons and joysticks up to an IPAC and Wha - Bam! Arcade awesomeness right at home.

I was wondering if any of you have ever attempted this before or even know what MAME is.

I'm hoping that when it's done it will look like:


I will update this thread every so often with how far I am on this project

[Jackolantern]

I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone here who doesn't know what MAME is

One of my friends has a MAME arcade cabinet, but he bought his mostly completed about 8 - 10 years back, right at the front-end of the MAME cabinet craze before much instructions existed to do it yourself. For being so old, it is mighty impressive, though! It has a large controller area which supports 4 players, and ingeniously arranges the controls to give each player a joystick, 8 buttons, a track ball, and 2 or 3 other less-used control schemes, which basically means you can play anything with it. It even includes 2 sets of pinball flipper buttons! It is an amazing setup, for sure, but he did pay a crapload of money for it lol. Good luck with it, and maybe make a Project Showoff thread to keep us up-to-date on how it is going. I don't see why an arcade-building project could not go in there!

[Ark]

This remembers me to the good times playing this things, always go to weekends to play mortal combat, killer instinct and marvel vs capcom against any random dude who appeared and inserted some tokens xD

good luck on the project!

[mattykins]

Haha i might just do that! As of now i've

Made a list of things i need to buy
Cleared my old PC's hard drive
Installed windows 98 on the old PC
Got most of the roms I wish to play

But now i'm facing an issue. I don't know which version of MAME to use haha. I was thinking dos mame, hence why I installed windows 98, but now I'm not so sure. Any recommendations?

EDIT: I decided on using Ubuntu and SDLmame for the cab.

[Jackolantern]

Probably a good idea. I am not 100% sure, but it just seems running Windows 98 and MAME through DOS could perhaps hurt hardware acceleration and could maybe limit some of the more recent games you could play. I have not played around with MAME much, though, so I can't be sure if it would have been a problem.

[mattykins]

Yeah, I heard that it is sometimes a bit sketchy to run it through DOS. So I think Ubuntu might be a better choice.

[TheClaus]

I made an arcade cabinet. I did cheat an bought X-Arcade but other than that it was building it. I have several emulators on it including MAME. It is a fun project.

[mattykins]

Haha if I had money for an X - Arcade joypad I most definantly would get one.

But its much cheaper just to buy Xarcades 20 button pack for 20$
And 2 8-way joysticks for like 10-15$

EDIT: Been changing my mind so much with this project! I'll move this to the project showoff tier like Jack said I should.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I actually should have a topic on here about my cabinet. I made one as well. used the OS developed just for Mame. I will try to find the topic. Got it somewhere.