70's & 80's Retro Arcade Gallery (1 Viewer)

[Michael Warner]

I built my MAME cabinet 2 years ago and it cost about $700 for parts and materials not including the old computer guts I had laying around. About a third of that was for the 25" TV I use as a monitor. This year I finally added a spinner to play Tempest and Arkanoid. Now I'm itching to build a cocktail cabinet to put upstairs in the HT room. Coming from someone with no woodworking skills whatsoever I have to say that it's a time consuming but fairly simple task to build your own arcade machine.

 

[Chris Bardon]

For those who have built their own cabinets, what have you used for wiring up your controls? I found a decent tutorial at one point on how to hack up a keyboard encoder, but haven't tried again since I messed up the attempt with the gamepad. Ideally, I'd like to do a 2p setup with two joysticks per player (for games like Smash TV), a 6 button street fighter configuration, and possibly an extra central mount 4 way joystick for older games. I know that's a lot of controls, and I'm not sure how well using an old keyboard would work for that. I'd rather not go with a pre-fab controller, since that sort of ruins the DIY aspect of the project, which is on top of costing a whole lot more...

 

[MarkMel]

I have also built my own Mame machine frome scratch. If you want info on how to do it, go here www.arcadecontrols.com More than enough information.

 

[Kevin M]

http://photos23.flickr.com/24816090_5cfcec36eb.jpg?v=0

Think we could go and get some more of that potted meat? MMMMM'HMMMMMM.

 

[Dave Elliott]

Thats my arcade cabinet in the message Nils posted.

It was pretty easy. I'd say almost that any game you wanted is probably available. At last count over 6000 games were out there for MAME, including every commercial arcade game you can think of, every 2600, every NES, NeoGeo etc. Even digital reproductions of any classic pinball machine. I have Berzerk and it is the original version, BTW. The cool thing about MAME is that the majority aren't replicas, they are the ACTUAL ROMS that were in the game machines way back. The hardware is emulated, not the game. So they are exact, identical in every way to the one you played years ago. Since they have not been used commercially in many years, most of the copyrights have long ago expired, those that aren't you can buy for a few bucks.

Its not expensive to build if you look around and already have the tools.

Home Depot: 3 sheets MDF, 3 2x6s, paint, drywall screws, door hinges, wood putty cost me around $40.

Controls: The deluxe control kit (2 joysticks and about 12 buttons) costs $25 from www.dreamarcades.com where I also got the t-molding for $8. A KeyWiz keyboard emulator is around $25 from www.groovygamegear.com it is plug and play and setup for MAME, so don't bother with the DIY hack. A commercial trackball and buttons (which acts as your mouse) was around $60-70 from dreamarcades (I got mine on ebay for less).

Total cost for the cabinet and controls should be $150-175 if you want a trackball, less than $100 if you just want 2P joysticks.

PCs are readily available cheap, I had an older PC so I bought a new Dell (you can buy one with an LCD for $299, sell the LCD for $150 on ebay, and have a new PC for $150) and moved my old PC into the MAME cabinet. For a screen, search craigslist in your local area and you should find tons of 19" monitors from folks upgrading to LCDs and who just want to get rid of it. I saw dozens of 19inch CRTs for $50 or so. Some were even free. Anything that'll do XGA works fine (BTW, the one in the pic is a 19" Sony Trinitron CRT, not a 17").


So say $150-175 for the cabinet, + $50 for a monitor, + $100-150 for a used PC = $300-$400 and you'll have every game you can remember all in one machine. Print out some graphics on a photo printer and spray glue them on and it's like a time warp.

It looks great next to my pinball machine, foosball, and all my sports stuff in the game room.

The only problem is when you find out that THE game, the one you played for days on end, the one you sunk thousands of quarters in, the one that you remember being THE BEST GAME OF ALL TIME --- well, don't be surprised when the entire ROM file in which it resides is like 5K. My favorite, TRON, is 4 games in one. It is 17K of programming.

I think programmers today are getting sloppy. ;-)

-Dave



-Dave

 

[Chris Bardon]

Dave, thanks for the info. Getting the Roms isn't a problem (I still have a complete set as of a couple years ago, so only missing the newly added stuff). I've seen information on going with the standalone keyboard encoder route that makes it sound like a decent idea. Might try just ripping apart an existing keyboard to start though (since I have a bunch of them lying around already), and upgrade if I decide I want something better. As for PC hardware, I have a bunch of old machines around, so it's just a matter of building something that will run all of the games I want with the hardware I have available. How do you find the 19" monitor (too small/large or about right)? It's been so long since I've played an actual arcade machine that I can't recall the typical monitor size...

As for the games being tiny, it comes with the territory of having to encode everything onto an EEPROM, and not having to add resources like sounds, complex graphics etc (and having to write everything in assembler).

 

[MarkMel]

While hacking a keyboard is certainly an option, you will have to worry about finding the keyboards matrix and even still you may have problems with ghosting. A keywiz or Ipac keyboard encoder will make your life much much easier by saving you time and making it easier to wire. Plus no ghosting.