Useful Tools And Sites

Here are some tools which I found made my life easier while working on my cabinet.

TeamViewer- Even if you have an usb port on the front of your cabinet like I do moving files and configuring stuff is always a chore because I have to walk back and forth and sit uncomfortably while configuring everything. TeamViewer is a life saver because it allows you to move files and remote control your cabinet from another computer, thus making everything way easier.

EmuMovies Downloader- Whenever you see a MAME cabinet, with every game there's at least one picture depicting it so the player knows what the game looks like before launching it and also looks better than just a list of titles. Those images are called snaps and there's one program that can download one for each game, and can also download pictures of control panels, marquees and promotional pictures for arcade games and most other systems.

Progetto Snaps- This is a site which provides full sets of snaps for MAME. If you have downloaded a ROM fullset, definitely check this site out, it's super useful and a good alternative to the emuMovies Downloader if you only want arcade games.

Mr. Do's Arcade- This is a wonderful site for MAME users, but it is especially useful because it hosts all those ini files like catver.ini and controls.dat which are hard to find sometimes. It also hastons of info about MAME, derivatives and frontends.

BYOAC- BYOAC is a forum dedicated exclusively to arcade games and can help you with anything related to arcade games, wheter it be building a cabinet or deciding which frontend to use.

Add Authenticity By Removing Nag Screens

For a couple of months the software part of my cabinet has been stable, I haven't changed much, nothing ever crashes and everything works the way it's supposed to. However, there was one thing that had been nagging me to no end ever since I started using MAME, about a year and half ago. The thing that was nagging me so much is called (very fittingly) "nag screens", those messages that pop up when you start a game and lecture you about how playing ROMs is illegal and tell you the information of the original hardware that ran the game. That is probably very useful to developers and whatnot, but when building a cabinet you want simplicity and having to move your joystick left and right and pressing a button every time you start a game can be tiring, not to mention how ugly it looks. Because of that I set out to find a MAME version which had been compiled to remove the nag screens. Luckily, I found it, so I didn't have to compile it.

These are what I'm talking about

If your cabinet is already running MAME 0.149 and you have everything set up and running, then you can just replace  the MAME executable, otherwise just copy the whole thing and put everything (roms snaps and .ini's) in their appropriate folders.

Download (0.149 32bit)
If you're running anything other than the version I have specified above, try this blog and see if they compiled it for the version you use-