Behold, the MAME cabinet

This thing took a ton of work to make, and I hardly ever have a chance to play it. Damn you family! It's sitting in my brother's basement, and he lives on the other side of town.

We started completely from scratch. It took both of us to run full sheets of MDF through the table saw. It was tough work. I ordered raw arcade parts off the internet and hooked them all up to a keyboard encoder. There are 4 microswitches in each joystick, and one with each button. So each press corresponds to a keyboard press. We also added a trackball and a spinner. They work a little differently. They have optical sensors so they essentially work the same way an old mouse does. If you really want to be a psycho you can manually create a spinner from old mouse parts.

From the pic you can see that we did the control panel layout ourselves too. That was pretty tough. My brother got a sheet of plexiglass for protection. So we drilled holes in everything, layed some artwork down on the panel, and wired it up. Those with a keen eye may notice the control panel artwork is from the original Space Invaders screen overlay. Old games only had a few pixels to work with, so to give the illusion of depth they added screen overlays. The monitor was actually down in the cabinet and it reflected onto a mirror with this art over it.

I took an image of the Dig Dug marquee down to Kinkos and had them print it out on backlit material. We stuck a little flouresent light behind it, and it looks great.

These pics are pretty amatuerish because my brother took them. It looks really good. The only thing missing is a bezel to hide the monitor. It's a 22" monitor. Typical arcade machines have 19" monitors so we have a pretty huge display.

Sooner or later I'll get around to reviewing some strange games from Japan like Poker Ladies.

God, his basement looks terrible in these pics. It's been cleaned up a bit since these were taken. It's a tragedy that thing isn't sitting in my game room.