I finally decided to go for it!

Who loves arcade action? Everybody.
Who doesn't want that genuine arcade feeling at home? Nobody.

So I'm gonna build a MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) full stand up cabinet for my home. I've never done anything like this before, so I'm gonna be learning as I go. And what better way to chronicle this endeavor than on 2+2.

Ok enough blah blah. Let's get to it.

On Craigslist I found this cabinet for 35 bucks. Pretty darn good condition! Although it's not in the pics, the marquee glass and front monitor glass are intact and in fine shape. The bad news was that it was located 50 miles away and I didn't have access to a truck. I found out the hard way that it did not fit in the back of my PT Cruiser with the seats out. Damn. So renting a truck cost me another 100. Total cost for getting the cabinet -> $135. I consider that a good price. Holy crap is it heavy! Many thankyous to Girlfriend for assisting in the moving process. Just another reason I <3 her.


We're going to strip this baby down and repair wood gouges where necessary, replace the T-molding on the edges, design and paint it to look like new. We're taking suggestions for a theme or design, marquee ideas, etc. The only thing to keep in mind is the color of the controls is not going to change. See below...

For the controls themselves, I'm going with this baby. Unfortunately they're sold out, so it's on backorder, but I have plenty of work to do before worrying about the controls, so it's no big deal. This equipment seems to be the perfect balance between professional feel and ease of installation. And let's not forget the coolness of having a trackball! 200 bucks.

For the arcade emulator itself, I have some old PC parts laying around that I can slap together that should be plenty to run these games. It's looking like a 2 Ghz machine with a gig of RAM. The only things I don't already have are a case, power supply, and speakers. I'm hoping to keep my ears open and score a free power supply and case that someone would otherwise throw out, and probably score some decent 20-30 dollar speakers off newegg or something.

The monitor is probably going to be a TV using S-Video input. 25" is the size screen the cabinet was designed for, however, with the addition of the TV housing, I may need to go a couple inches smaller. This is clearly going to be a case of "Measure three times, buy once." I'll have to construct some sort of mount/brackets to hold it in place. Again, I'll be watching craigslist for this. I've pretty much ruled out using a "real" arcade monitor. They're expensive and require a little more technical knowledge. A LCD computer monitor is another possibility, but would be more money than I want to spend. I anticipate landing a suitable monitor for $100 or less as it seems every is getting rid of their old bulky TVs.

As for the MAME program, I'm thinking of using Maximus Arcade as the frontend application to control game selection, etc. It's not a free program, but with this type of thing I'm guessing you get what you pay for. Does anyone here have any experience with these?

Overall this should be a lot of fun and definitely a learning experience. I'm shooting for a target finishing date around mid-June. Wish me luck!

Good luck man, can't wait to see how it turns out. I'd love to get one of those for my house.

Interesting, I've been thinking about doing one of these for a while.

Why not get a true arcade monitor so you have the old school refresh rate (15 Hz?)? I heard they make the graphics much better than trying to use a modern PC monitor. Not sure how a TV w/S-video plays into all that so you may be ahead of me on the information curve...

The resources I've been reading have pretty much said that the TV/S-video is a viable option, so I figure I'll try that first. If I don't like it, I've spent maybe 50 bucks. No biggie. So I'm going to try that first.

Update!

While checking out the inside of the cabinet, I came across 4 tokens! WOOT!

I'm very interested in updates to this thread.

Let me say that I've never been able to get a mame emulator to work before.

But if I did.. oh lordy, they x-men arcarde games I would be playing on a daily basis..!

X-Arcade sticks are OK, but you can probably get a much better 2-player control panel (with arcade-quality parts, not the X-Arcade knockoff garbage) custom built for you for 200 bucks on the shoryuken forums.

Have you tried Mame32? It makes it much easier to boot games.

Nice, I would love that even if it only played those Raiden games...

Today I did a lot of thinking about the hardware. I originally planned to do it on a lower budget reusing some older computer parts. However, after thinking it over, and getting some good news on my tax return (yes I know I'm getting around to it late), I'm going to beef up the system some to insure it lasts. Gonna go with an AMD 6000+ processor I've got laying around and build the system around that. I'd rather have more power than I need then just squeaking to get by. Also on the purchase list is a biggity ass hard drive. Gonna throw the music collection on there as well and have the machine double as game player and jukebox. Party at my house guys! Heck, if we're gonna do this, we might as well do it right. Right? Right.

Gahhhh please build your own stick/button control panel x-arcades are garbage you're ruining everythingggggg

Opinions are nice. However, explanations as to the reasoning behind your opinions are more helpful.

Reviews I've read of the tankstick have been favorable. That plus the ease of installation so far have made it my choice. Perhaps you can share your experiences to paint a clearer picture.

I used to own an X-arcade dual stick (the one without the trackball). Their button layout is strange, the components they use (stick and buttons) are garbage compared to quality happ competition buttons and iL competition sticks, and in my experience their PCB's suffer from input lag (i.e., when you push a button, there is a slight delay before the input is registered in the game).

Do you have any access to power tools? If you can get access to a table saw and a drill press you can make a control panel that will be MUCH better quality and fit your cabinet perfectly along with laying out the buttons exactly how you would like them to be.

The only way I would recommend using an X-Arcade control panel is if you're absolutely set on having a trackball, because an arcade caliber trackball will run you 100+ for the part alone.

Edit - here's the last stick I've built. I used Happ competition buttons and an iL eurojoy competition stick wired to a playstation controller circuit board. You can get lagless PS2 -> PC converters for under 20 bucks.

I do really want a trackball. That just kinda puts it up and above on the coolness meter, ya know?

Well this X-Arcade unit has a satisfaction or money back guarantee. So I'll give it a shot and see how I feel about it. Obviously if I don't like the feel it's out the door.

Yeah trackballs are pretty sick and I don't have any experience working with em so I don't know how hard it is to install one yourself.

Also if you decide you don't like the feel of the X-Arcade parts you can still mod the parts out for arcade parts yourself.

We have one of these at work....so much awesomeness. I'm currently constructing my own custom cabinet but it's slow going.

how does one decide which games to put on this? are there any restrictions? do you have something planned already?

You basically have the ability to put whatever you want on it. However, the legallity of that is a very sensitive issue in the gaming community. I'm hoping to avoid a lengthy debate on the software issue in this thread and instead focus on the fun of building the machine. Let's just leave it at that.

I placed an order with Newegg last night for the computer case, power supply, and harddrive I need to have all the pieces I need to construct the computer which will power the machine by monday or tuesday. So my "weekend" (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for me) will probably be spent getting that part up and running.

this is very very cool.

Looking forward to following this thread. Good luck!

So out of curiosity has anyone actually played this "Radikal Bikers" game? I had never heard of it before I saw the cabinet. My girlfriend and I tried to guess the year of the game based off just the name (Wow! Like, these bikers are RADIKAL dude! Totally tubular!) and the disgustingly ugly orange, green, and blue cabinet and were both thinking somewhere around 1990 or so. WRONG. This game came out in freaking 1998. The manufacture date on the cabinet is June 98.

Edit: Video of gameplay Oh good god. Looks like we're doing a favor by gutting this POS. If you want a laugh, listen to the music during gameplay. It actually has a lyric "Get out of my way. I'm a radikal biker!" I'm not making this up. Dead serious. Dead. ****ing. Serious.

good project

i'd second the custom controls vs. xarcade.

I think the preferred method is the I-PAC for custom cabs

http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html

Hahaha that game really looks and sounds like a pos!

Cool project btw, gl!

Oh yeah, I remember watching this a while back:
http://revision3.com/systm/mamecase/
They build a arcade machine from scratch.
Just click on next episode right under the player. Part 1 &2 are mostly about the case.

By looking at the wikipedia page, it looked like a crazy taxi knockoff, but it is just a boring racer.