FlatulentFish All Kinds of Junk

The Emulator - MAME and all of it's incarnations

MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is the software that makes this whole thing possible. From the MAME website:

Operating System History

I went through several iterations of the operating system for my cabinet. The earliest version of my cabinet used DOS; this had the obvious advantage of extremely low overhead, but was simply too limiting due to lack of hardware support. The first computer that I used in the cabinet was an old AMD K6-3/400 machine with a whopping 128 MB of RAM; low overhead was an important consideration. Network support, CD Rom support, etc were near impossibilities. Gameplay was pretty fast, sound worked...OK, but it was just too limiting.

The sofware that drives the arcade cabinet

Arcade games have always held a special appeal for me. I had the pleasure of growing up during the so-called "Golden Age" of arcade gaming, widely held to be the years between 1980 and 1985 or so. My earliest memories of these games are from late elementary school and junior high, when a trip to the local roller skating rink was a major social event.

After deciding to tackle this project, I did quite a bit of digging. Custom built cabinets were available, but they were really expensive - well over $1,000 US for a decent cabinet. Too much. I looked into old cabinets, but these were either too expensive, too beaten up, or both. The nice cabinets that I did find were in such nice shape that it would have been a shame to deface them; in my opinion, these deserved to be restored to pristine condition. This left custom design.

A few years ago I designed and built my own arcade cabinet. This story documents my motivations for doing so and the process that I went through in the build process. It has been a fun project - if you have ever truly loved playing the classic arcade games, you might think about building one for yourself.