MAME Arcade Cabinet
 

I think this is going to be my next bored engineer project. We are looking at a house that has a ginormous basement which will become my manroom/moto garage. I will have plenty of room for my toys and plenty of room to add new toys. I have always wanted a classic arcade game, but I could never really decide which one I wanted most. I like pac-man, donkey kong, and all the classics; but I just see that taking up space after I get bored with the one classic game. It would also be cool to get one of those awesome 4 player games from my childhood like Gauntlet or TMNT.

Then I started thinking about it and decided I want to build a MAME cabinet from scratch, because it would be awesome and I could play any game. I could also customize the shit out of it.

Been looking at plans online, I think I want the classic display setup vs the gallery display.

Gallery:
http://www.dreamauthentics.com/images/elaebay.jpg

Classic:
http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Custom-MAME-t...6DzUUQ~~_3.JPG

Classic just looks better, but I bet gallery is a little easier to play without fatigue. Think most of the bigger monitor plans are with the gallery too.

Definitely going to do 4 Happ 8-ways for the 4 player controls with at least 6 buttons for each player. Street fighter bitches! Then want a dedicated Happ 4-way in the middle for classics like Pac-Man. Debating making all the buttons clear with LED lighting, would look pretty sweet. May go ahead and do a track ball, never really played track ball games, but might as well wire one up.

I got a few months of planning before we settle into a house and I can start building, but this would be a fun project.

Talked to another sign guy and I want to design the artwork and mylar and have him print it out for me. Completely custom epicness.

The ultimate nerd cave?

I say get a walk out basement and turn it into a moto project garage extension.

This is something I've considered doing a number of times in the past... IMHO, I wouldn't use a PC... Get an old Xbox and softmod it. The emulators for whatever reason always seemed to work better on there...

Also, I don't understand why anyone would just do a MAME only cabinet... I have a modded Xbox with everything from MAME to Atari to N64 and literally tens of thousands of games on it... 300GB HD - easy peasy... Oh, and there's like 50 Xbox games and a good bit of music on it as well.

Oh... and, one of my ideas was to make the cabinet a sit down job like the racing games... I wanted to do a rotating control station in which you could flip between a racing wheel setup and a regular controller layout...

That's a seperate room and already a given, probably going to ask for a lift for my birthday for it.

Think of the house I use to have and then the entire footprint besides the garage will be a walkout basement. This thing is divided up into 2 very big rooms, it will probably be turned into 2 big rooms and two regular bedrooms with a bathroom. The garage room will still be epic huge. Probably like two 1 car garages connected length wise. The other big room will probably be slightly bigger than the mancave I had in the other house.

If you're going to do it, go all out. Get a surround sound system for the fucking thing too... I'd stick to something sub-600 watts cause you're going to be right in the fucking middle of the thing...

Fuck... now I'm jonesing for this project myself...

It won't be solely MAME, it will definitely run a variety of systems. The power plant doesn't strictly have to be one system or computer either. I can get a monitor that allows me to switch between an xbox/computer/whatever. Still planning that part. I just called it MAME, because that's just a standard thing to call these cabinets.

I like the bench idea, but I will probably go standup. I think I like a classic look over functionality like the gallery setup.

Yeah, I do want to do this, one dude I saw made his a jukebox as well, it was pretty neat. It would be pretty cool to tie it in with my itunes airplay setup I currently have and be able to control it from my android phone/Mac/iPad.

Awesome man... do it up.