Since this a blog about MAME arcade cabinets I thought it'd be fitting that my first post was about mine.
Over the past few months I've been working on and off in my cabinet and I have to say that it's an amazing hobby.
So, the cab itself is from a multi game machine that used to be in a bar but because it had no use was given to me for free as long as I gave the coin mech and the board to the owner. I didn't need any of those, so it was a great deal.
Since the original screen was dead and I had no money for a converter, I just trashed it and instead installed a regular Samtron CRT pc monitor which I spray painted black. It works well and has a reasonable size.
Inside it I have a pc which I built from old parts, it's very old but runs MAME and a few other emulators without any problem, the specs are as follows:
If you're wondering what Jacinto&Martins is, I think they're a company which makes entertainment stuff for bars.
Over the past few months I've been working on and off in my cabinet and I have to say that it's an amazing hobby.
So, the cab itself is from a multi game machine that used to be in a bar but because it had no use was given to me for free as long as I gave the coin mech and the board to the owner. I didn't need any of those, so it was a great deal.
Since the original screen was dead and I had no money for a converter, I just trashed it and instead installed a regular Samtron CRT pc monitor which I spray painted black. It works well and has a reasonable size.
Inside it I have a pc which I built from old parts, it's very old but runs MAME and a few other emulators without any problem, the specs are as follows:
- Windows XP 32-bit
- Intel Celeron 320 @ 2.4MHz
- 512MB of RAM
- Nvidia GeForce 2 MX (basically useless)
- Random creative sound card
- 40GB Hard Drive
So as you can see, it's a very moddest pc, but it runs most MAME games, except of course for 3D games, but what pc can run those on MAME flawlessly?
The control panel has evolved a bit over time, originally it had those pear shaped american style joysticks, but since they were mostly dead I replaced them with some Chinese ball top joysticks which I ordered from ali-express and they work great. The control panel also used to have only two regular arcade buttons and one big round button which was split in half, the kind you usually see on those children rides inside shops. I replaced those odd buttons with a couple of blue chinese buttons which I also ordered from ali-express. I used one of the buttons I ordered to make a power button for the pc, it looks really cool and it's a great way to not have to dig inside the cabinet every time I want to turn it on.
On the software side, the cabinet is Windows XP based, because it's light, boots fast and has everything I need. It runs MAME version 0.149 along with a couple other emulators which are wrapped neatly in a frontend called MaLa, which I like a lot.
Sound wise, it uses a 2.1 speaker system from Thrust, which gets the job done.
The cabinet is always evolving and there is always something I want to add. I'm thinking the next step is buying some vinyls to hide that weird branding and making a decent cover for the hole where the coin mech used to be.
These pictures show the state of the cabinet the day this was written.
If you're wondering what Jacinto&Martins is, I think they're a company which makes entertainment stuff for bars.
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