Mame Arcade

I am building a theater/arcade in our new house in the bay area. I had this Mame Arcade Machine built for me with custom art work and LEDS. It has over 23,000 games on it. Pretty much every arcade game. Every nintendo super nintendo sega and Neo Geo game on it. I am more of an old school guy so I love playing games with just an A and B button. My wife and I have been having some major tetris battles.
I also have two light guns for shooting games and a steering wheel for driving games. Haven't busted them out yet, too busy with all the other games.

How much was the bad boy, it looks AWESOME

Great looking box!! I've collected ROMs for a while, but lost most of them. Always planned to build a box but it's one of those projects that gets knocked down the household priority ladder. Have fun with it!!

Mikey - this thing is ridiculous. I can't wait to check it out.

i had all of those on a hacked xbox. Like every game ever ever. Was fun for a while... your setup would be more fun because it would give the old skool feel,

I'm impressed.

i had all of those on a hacked xbox

Thats what I'm doing now, but it isn't as fun because you've got unlimited continues

That's awesome! I'm planning on building a smaller cabinet for the cabin.

Mike, what MAME software is that? Is the emulator (or whatever it's called) just "Arcade Classics", or where did you get that software?

Found it..

http://cgi.ebay.com/Custom-MAME-tm-A...item45f5a55b05

Michael it uses hyperspin front end. Which is pretty cool.
http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/

I am not very techy so the front end technology is pretty important to me.

http://mamedev.org/

Sweet, I've been familiar with MAME for years, but never got into the frontends. I've been messing with Hyperspin for a few days, and love it - definitely makes it a lot easier to build the cabinet!

Mike, sweet Mame cabinet. Not to jack, but I built my own from scratch. I built it out of 1/2" MDF. and painted the outside and covered it with T-molding. I bought the individual parts for the controller. I have a setup for 4 players and am working on the the trackball. Currently, it has hundreds of classic games - Pac Man, Galaga, Dig Dug. Also want to get some of the newer games such as Golden Tee and possibly add a gun for Area 51. I'm going with an Auburn theme on the outside (please - no haters!) First time that I've done it, so let's hope it works.

Here are a few pics.

I have a cousin who's also an avid wakeboarder who built his own unit just like this. I'll forward him the link to this thread.

Jeff hi jack all you want. That is awsome. I love seeing what other people do and get ideas from other people on this kind of stuff. Check out the pics in my profile of our lake house.
I have a great vision for this area when it is done, I think it will be really smooth. Just gotta get the cash flow to do it right.

Looks great Jeff. Where did you buy all of your buttons and joysticks from? I've been looking at buying from Suzo-Happ (Happcontrols.com), but wanted to see if there is a better online retailer.

I was playing with the remote light guns last night. Those things are awsome. You guys should definately add to your system if you can.

Sinko, I got all the buttons and joysticks off of E-bay. They are Suzo happ joysticks (8 way) and I just ordered a Happ trackball for Golden Tee! I got them from a e-bay seller named Twisted Quarter. The blue buttons came prewire for leds but the orange ones did not. I'm in the process of getting them to light up with individual LEDs that I got from radio shack.

A little more info about the system:

The PC is an old computer that I retired. It's an old Penium4 that is in the cabinet. The control from the control panel to the board is done through an IPAC4. You can get it here. http://ultimarc.com/ipac1.html You can see the IPAC 4 in the photo showing the bottom of the control panel. It looks like a small PC board.

The IPAC 4 converts the movements of the joysticks/buttons to a keyboard input. The PC sees it as a keyboard letter. It's pretty simple. There is no software that had to be installed on the computer. The IPAC4 connects through a USB connection on the PC.

The computer is connected to an old TV that I had. You need a VGA to RCA converter (depending on what TV you have - you could do it via HDMI if you have a newer TV.) Since the TV that I had was old, it had a RCA video input . I had to convert the VGA to RCA so I needed a converter box. I prepared the graphics in Adobe Photoshop and had some guy print the marque. It's lit up with a florescent light.

The software for the games is all over the internet. Search MAME - Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. You can even add Atari, Nintendo, Super NES, Sega games. Pretty awesome.

I also use hyperspin for the front end.

I will say Neo Geo has to be the coolest old school system ever. THere is nothing like a little baseball stars!

This post has motivated me to go ahead and do this....

I've wanted to for a while but never really had the push (play all these games on a modded xbox) but the arcade feel was always gone - and I have a similar Bar/Theater setup whick this would be awesome for.

Any size recommendation on the screen? I found a shell cabinet with a screen (33") for $300 (hopefully can lowball) ... would that be good you think?

....Also does hyperspin allow for other types of emulation/roms in the menu system -- like n65, dreamcast, etc etc or just MAME arcade style games?

Hyperspin allows just about everything. I have dreamcast on there. A bunch of japanese consoles and some stuff I have never heard of. Plus a bunch of PC games

Hyperspin allows just about everything

Good to know!

Here is the cabinet I found - too lazy to try and build, no controls but that is easy enough - looks like an okay deal