Here’s the promised post finally.

Are you old enough to remember Space Invaders? Some will answer yes and others will answer no.

Are you old enough to remember Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man? Same as above.

Do you remember Mortal Kombat?

Now, those who answered no, how about Marvel vs. Capcom?

King of Fighters 2003?

If you still answer no, just how old are you? j/k’ing. 🙂

Anyhow to bring these and many other games back to life, there is a program called MAME. And many people have used this program to bring home the 80’s and 90’s arcade experience by building their own arcade cabinet powered by MAME or paid for one. I’ve built one myself using an arcade cabinet of a Pacmania game and an old computer system. The current version as of this writing is version .134. I’ve used it since version .3x from way back in 2000. The number system is a little different than normal programs. The number after the period is like normal counting. So .30 (thirty) is older than .134 (one-hundred thirty four). I think the devs didn’t think they would reach over 100 and still be behind the decimal. /shrug

The cabinet itself I lucked into. I found someone who posted on a forum that he would give the cabinet away for free to anyone who would come pick it up. And I found it a few days after he posted it but sent him a message asking if he still had it. He did and I went to get it.

The system doesn’t require it to be something like an ultimate PC gaming machine. Actually it could work with a computer you are willing to throw away or donate how old it can be. MAME can run on any pentium class machine but later builds would recommend at least a Pentium III. Depending on if you will run it from command line or not depends on the version with or without GUI. On my cabinet, I run a loader and have it boot to the DOS of Windows 98.

Running the GUI version vs command line version has pluses and minuses. GUI is easy and you can visually point and click which game to run. Command line version seems to work with some ROMs that won’t work with GUI version for some odd reason.

I purchased a HotRod SE joystick from Hanaho which ran me about $100. If you are building a cabinet it is well worth it. Another one is the X-Arcade Joystick which I saw was sold at Fry’s even. However, Hanaho gives you a disk with some ROMs.

The legality of the ROMs is sort of the problem with MAME. You shouldn’t have the ROM unless you actually have a right to own it. Hanaho reached an agreement with some of the copyright owners to distribute their games with the HotRod joystick (or if you buy a full cabinet from Hanaho). Therefore I will not link where you may find ROMs on the internet.

Printing the marque for my cabinet was done pretty cheap through Kinko’s. The backlight for it was a regular black florescent light I picked up from Home Depot. It took about 3 days for me to complete the project. First day was mostly spent cleaning out the cabinet and painting it. Second day was mostly spent finish the painting, moving inside, getting the marque ordered, head back to Home Depot to get the light and get the computer that would be used loaded and configured. I use EmuLoader on mine. Final day was mostly finishing touches and taking the HotRod apart so it would fit my cabinet and mount it. Everything else that followed was just cosmetic.

The biggest expense was the joystick. Everything else together didn’t even equal the joystick price thanks to the fact a cabinet landed in my lap.

With MAME you can relive the past with some of the games and I have seen some done in this decade as well make their way into MAME.