MAME
My interest in arcade machines
I’m a huge fan of the 80’s arcade games. If I just had the space for it, I would have a lot of those obsolete and bulky arcade machines of the past. But, to my luck there are some clever folks who have developed MAME. For those of you who don’t know what MAME is, please have a look at the MAME web site in the MAME Links section. MAME has done what I thought would be impossible, that is the construction of a piece of software that enables a standard Windows PC to run most of the old arcade games on one and the same computer. MAME makes it possible to do away with the old arcade hardware and still have the look and feel of the real thing.
But there is a long way from a desktop PC running MAME to a fully featured MAME machine. The desktop PC does the emulation job alright, but the real arcade feeling comes with the cabinet. But you can’t just buy a MAME cabinet, and even if you did succeed to find one up for sale, the shipping costs would be astronomical. So the way to go for me was to make one myself, but it’s a whole lot easier said than done. I have the basic skills to do wood works, but I couldn’t find some decent construction plans. There are a lot of photos of arcade cabinets out there, but that’s all there is. What I needed was some detailed plans on how to build a MAME arcade cabinet from scratch. I was about to give up and revert to my usual desktop PC setup, when I stumbled over a really wonderful cabinet on the internet. And the best part was that there were detailed instructions on how to build it – just what I needed. The person behind the idea was a fellow Dane, Rasmus Koenig, who I wrote right away.
Rasmus was very helpful in any way and answered all my questions. I used his basic layout, with one exception: I am quite tall, so I had to add some extra 12 centimeters to the cabinet height. I bought all the stuff I needed from the local hardware store and fired up my power tools. I’m now almost halfway through the project and I’ve decided to put the whole construction process on the web, have a look at it in the Step By Step section.
My MAME project is now coming to an end. I've made a final version of the control board with help from Kailow Graphic which has done an excellent job in printing the marquee and the control board overlay. I still need to finish some minor details, eg. mount a suitable on/off button and an external power button for the computer. When that's done, I just have to enjoy playing games on my own homemade arcade machine.
Step by Step...
The link below shows the whole building process in a step by step manner.
Links...
Below you'll find a collection of MAME and arcade related links.