As many of you know, I love playing retro games, and one of the many emulators that I use is MAME, which allows users to play classic original arcade games on a modern PC. It has always been a dream of mine to build one myself one day.
Anyway, during the school sumer holiday, I got chatting with an electrician who was doing some work for the school. He said that he had built his own arcade cabinet and that he would bring it in one day for me to see....
Today he popped in to show me it - To say I was shocked when he said "Do you want it" is an understatement. I mean, I was prepared to give him some money for it, but he just said that he wanted to get rid of it because it was using up too much space in his house. He insisted that I just take it.
So now I am the proud owner of a custom made MAME cabinet complete with original arcade joystick and buttons (and about 13gb of arcade roms.... ssshhhhhhhh)!!!
It needs a little work done to it, so I have left it at the school so that me and the ICT technician can improve it during lunchtimes and after work, but it works really well. Its basically an old motherboard with 512mb onboard and an old AMD Athlon XP 2500+ processor stuck to the base of the cabinet which is made from MDF. An old CRT monitor has been placed into a slot to hold it in place, and it has had an old pair of speakers disassembled and stuck to the sides for sound. A bracket supports the harddrive to the side of the cabinet which has a very basic Windows XP operating system installed. The whole thing is set to autorun MAME32 on startup, although it it quite capable to play other emulators. A Nintendo64 emulator is also included on the drive, so it'll be great to play Mario 64 arcade style!!!!!!
I'm sooooooooooooooo happy!!
I can't wait for Monday now - then I can play Commando, Paperboy, Pac-Mania, Buggy Boy, Chase HQ and all of those other great games that I spent so much money on down at Southend Seafront during my childhood!
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