|
Welcome to my
website. I am glad you dropped by. Come back often during the
beginning of 2004 as early 2004 was the time I decided to build a
MAME Cabinet!
If you are still reading
this far, then it sounds like you are interested in finding out
more about how to build a MAME cabinet, and more specifically, how I
built mine. What is a MAME cabinet? In layman’s terms, MAME is a
computer software program that runs on a PC and can emulate (or
play) almost every known arcade/video game known to man. You know,
games like Pac-Man, Q-Bert, Defender, Joust, etc. In fact, there is
an entire community on the internet who are dedicated to the
preservation of these classic games. Check out
www.byoac.com for more examples
of MAME cabinets. My Mame Cabinet is
I am not in a
hurry and plan on experimenting as I go along. I also plan on
documenting the process as much as I can and make the project as
detailed as I can. If you have a question. Feel free to contact me
at garrywh@garry.ca and I will
try to answer your question.
Caution: You may
see me redoing certain parts as I have found a better way. This is
me during the learning process and I plan on documenting these F@##
as I go along (hey, were only Human, Eh?).
For more information, go the
www.mame.net for a starting point on this community. Not only are
these communities involved in keeping the software (ROMS) alive, but
also the Video Game cabinets. Some of these folks retrofit existing
game cabinets, while others (like me), build everything from the
ground up, including the cabinet and control panel.
But wait, I am
getting a little ahead of myself. To put everything into perspective
(for those of you currently in your thirties/forties), lets go back
twenty six years. The late seventies, early eighties. These were my
teenage years. Songs like Surrender (Cheap Trick) and We Are the
Champions (Queen) and Who Are You (the Who) were on the airwaves (http://www.bradboard.com/top1978.html).
This was also what is known as the Bronze Age of Video Games
(1971-1980). Games like Space Invaders, Asteroids to Marble Madness
and Joust were the games to play (among hundreds of others in this
period). These were the days when I was foot loose and fancy
free, and dropping every quarter I earned into a video game at the
local arcade. As I entered my twenties, other interests came up (like
work, career, raising a family) and I abandoned video gaming and moved
on.
In 2001, I came
across a Mame Arcade link (must have been searching for games and came
across Pacman or something, and it was awakened.. For some reason, I started looking for
video arcade game emulators on Google and came across Mame. After some
research and tinkering, I was able to get some ROM games up and
running and ever since have been hooked on the game.
I have done some
woodworking n the
past (built a few other types of cabinets in my past), and decided I
would build my own cabinet rather than trying to find an existing
cabinet. I have very little experience in electronics (other than a
course I took in college back many years ago), so this will be the
most challenging part of the project for me.
|
