My Arcade Cabinet, have a look!

[Cirrus]

I just signed up for this group on the forums, and Flack said I should post my cabinet. So here, it is:

http://www.afreeimagehost.com/upload/6037/Cabinet.JPG

It's a bit of a large image, so I figured I'd just put the link.

The cabinet is an old Data East cabinet. I believe it had Bad Dudes in it. I bought it with a Tennis game in it, but it was non-functional. It had been re-assigned, I guess. Anyway, I ripped it down to a shell (didn't take much) and sanded it, repainted it, and mounted a 2 player x-arcade controller on it.

Then I got some plexiglass cut at Lowe's to fit the bezel and the marquee. I ordered the sideart, bezel art, and marquee art for about 100 bucks from mamemarquees.com. Great site, and he works with you to make sure you like it. He even changes the art on the bezel to just what I wanted. High quality material, too.

I sanded and repainted the coin doors, put a P3-450 with about 400 megs of RAM inside (enough for NeoGeo games!), and ripped my speakers from my old sony boombox and put them inside above the monitor. Then I ran a wire from my soundcard into the microphone port on the boombox. I am using Mamewah as a front end, and I finally have it up and running.

I am happy as hell with it. The dog is my Jack Russell, Zoey.

Cost:
Cabinet: $70
21 inch monitor: $90 (used)
Old computer: Free
Boombox: Free
2 player X-arcade: $100 (ebay)
Plexiglass: $30
Art: $100
Paint: $10
4500 ROMs: Free

Grand Total: $400 dollars. I'd have to say that is a damn good bottom line.

Please let me know what you think!

[Arcade Antics]

Nice lookin' cab, ya done good!

Nice lookin' dog too. I only have one question.

Isn't "Zoey" spelled "Zoe" ?

[Cirrus]

Well, it could, but on the dog papers it says Zoey. "Zoe" could just be pronouced "Zo." With the "Y", there is no question.

Thanks for the comment on the cabinet.

[Flack]

Great looking cabinet!

My friend ordered hs side art from the same guy I believe. It was much easier to put on than we had imagined and really makes his (and your) cabinet look professional!

I am still experimenting with front ends. I just set up EmuWizard with mine which is close to what I want, but I still have a feeling I'll end up writing my own before I'm completely happy.

[Cirrus]

Well, I really suggest that you look into MameWah, if you haven't already. It is extremely customizable. This makes it pretty darn confusing, but you can really do quite a lot with it. It also manages multiple emulators, and everything is very easily controlled with the joysticks.

[chadtower]

Now THAT is a cab no one minds being MAMEd...

[MagicMajenta]

Nice cab. So did you go to Ultimarc.com to buy the stuff to connect your PC to the cab.

[Cirrus]

No, inside is just a PC with a big PC monitor and the Xarcade joystick hooks up to the keyboard port. Sound goes into a microphone jack on a sony boombox and the speakers are mounted above. No original hardware inside at all.

[Necromutant]

Nice looking cab, your dog looks like he wants to attack you!

[Cirrus]

Thanks. The dog is a "she", and she is definitely just trying to run away. I have a habit of making her sit down whenever I am photographing my cabinet.

Also, this is my 200th post. Cherry time, booyah!

[tholly]

Very nice looking cab.

[RockyRaccoon]

Great looking cabinet!

My friend ordered hs side art from the same guy I believe. It was much easier to put on than we had imagined and really makes his (and your) cabinet look professional!

I am still experimenting with front ends. I just set up EmuWizard with mine which is close to what I want, but I still have a feeling I'll end up writing my own before I'm completely happy.

Custom MAME Front Ends for MAME Cabinets.....

Now THERES an idea I'll try. :-). Mhmmmm...

[Cirrus]

MameWah is so customizable that it is just like writing your own. It comes with a very powerful editor where you lay out exactly what is displayed where, etc... It's great.

[Lady Jaye]

Great-looking cabinet!!! And for $400 bucks, it's a nicely unexpensive project!!!

Do you guys think that an old iMac (the large, 1st gen models) running MacMAME on OS9 would be a bad choice as a MAME cabinet computer? I'm wondering because I have my old iMac 350 MHz that I no longer use and I might just keep it for MAME (as I've pointed out, MacMAME on OS 9 was pretty much a completed project when OSX came out and Brad Oliver had to basically restart the MacMAME project from scratch)...

Of course, I don't have at all the space to have even one small arcade cabinet at home, but I'm still curious to know what you guys think...

[Cirrus]

You could definitely build a tabletop Mame cab with that. (Sort of like those games at bars.) It all depends on if it will run all the games you want. Also, you probably won't be able to use many of the nicer front ends. Look to see what has been released.

[Lady Jaye]

What I'll do finally is pretty simple (but not quite the same thing): I'll simply remove all the non-essential files in my iMac that I still wanna keep and transfer them to my external hard drive (the iMac is 6 GB, my HDD partition still has 50 GB free after storing tons of files). I'll take the time to verify all the MAME roms I have and replace those that don't work with valid ones. Then, I'll move the computer to the bedroom (we have a desk with nothing on top). I'll keep it there to play MAME and older games (like Warcraft I and II). That way, it'll free a lot of space on the living room table (where the iMac and the iBook are located). Besides, I no longer use the iMac for browsing or downloading stuff...

This also means that, if I were to buy myself a double-stick X-Arcade, I'll have the place to put it down in front of the puter.