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People have been doing that even before the Raspberry Pi existed.

In case you or anyone is interested, someone has made an entertaining simulation of the game, but you need some bin files in order to get it to work.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.co...

Switchres for Linux will do real arcade modelines for you.

Just like going out to see a movie is no longer the only option with home theaters and huge screens, getting the real "arcade" feeling is no longer tied to a location if you can get the cabinet inside your home.

A lot of people have been building their own arcade cabinets for the last decade or two with the help of community websites such as Arcade Controls. There's also plenty of companies who sell real arcade parts such Happ/Sanwa/Seimitsu buttons and joysticks, others sell "empty" cabinets in which you add your own game hardware (console or computer).

The page you linked to didn't actually manage to redirect for me. For anyone else interested and having the same issue, go here

Arcade Controls. Don't let the front page give you a bad impression, the interesting parts are in the forums.

Arcade Controls. Don't let the front page give you a bad impression, the interesting parts are in the forums.

There's quite a few projects about dynamic arcade cabinet marquees on Arcade Controls forums.

Most nerds I know still have their own websites, or at least are members of very specialized website forums such as ArcadeControls. But regular people and most family members have Facebook accounts.

ArcadeControls.

I'm trying to think of any non-trackball / non-wheel / non-paddle stick-based arcade games that used analog controls from a retro time-period, and the only one I'm coming up with is Afterburner.

MAME can answer that question, more or less.

Under the MAWS deluxe search, change 'controls' to 'stick' which is MAME-ese for analogue joystick/yoke. You get this list including things like 720, Enduro Racer, Paperboy, SW/TESB/ROTJ, Space Harrier and Thunder Blade to pick a few classics.

To respond to the original question about joysticks, a lot of people build their own arcade sticks. The parts are readily available and the build doesn't need to be hard.arcadecontrols.com is a great resource and community for scratching that itch.

The truth is though that every type of home system is/was different, and the controls that suit a Commodore 64 and nothing like what suits a SNES, or an N64. If you're trying to recreate original-feel controllers for even a handful of emulated systems, it's going to be a lot of hassle obtaining them all, let alone getting them to work. A decently-made fighter stick plus an X360 controller should be enough to cover most bases most of the time.

Gentoo runs my hard-core gaming rig. Yes, it drives my hardware just fine. And there is no unnecessary bloat.

I do cover the legalities of ROMs and such in the book. I attempted to distinguish between the moral issue of using ROMs (short version: That's a personal decision for you to make) and the legal issue of using ROMs (that for the most part it involves a copyright violation). I mention the various clearly legal ways to get ROMs (the alas defunct StarRoms service for instance, compilations you can buy, etc), and the grey area (are you entitled to use a ROM if you own the board set, for instance).

One point I want to make though is that the book is not about building a MAME cabinet. You'll never hear me refer to one as a MAME cabinet. It's about building an arcade cabinet that runs various software which is an important distinction. Most people will run MAME, of course, however there are hundreds and hundreds of other software games that you can run legally that don't involved copyright violations. Digital Leisure games, Atari releases for the PC, shareware/freeware games that are replicas or similar to arcade games, retroremakes.com, Dance Dance Revolution, the open source dance pad game I can't recall the name of, Williams Classics if you can find it, etc. The two top games as far as my kids are concerned on the cabinet I built are Jazz Jackrabbit and a game called "Best Friends" (retro64.com).

At any rate, thanks for the review Craig and the comments everyone!

--- John St.Clair
        Project Arcade
        http://www.projectarcade.com/
        Build Your Own Arcade Controls
        http://www.arcadecontrols.com/

I'd recommend the A-PAC as this uses the USB gamepads as the discrete controllers to program. This is much simpler to set up and you don't have to worry about ghosting keys. Its also good if you don't want the arcade machine and you make a desktop arcade box, you can use it for other PC games that use gamepads.

The author of this book runs Arcadecontrols.com, which provides a lot more information on building an arcade machine.

That depends on what you consider investment
you could get some money out of it renting it for parties perhaps, opening a LAN-House, or even better you could build a hyper-resolution arcade with it and resell it with profit!

It all depends on how much you see opportunity where others see entertainment....

I still get worn out playing ROBOTRON, arguably one of the best games ever...

Oh, here a neat link for control ideas ...

I don't know... Building your own arcade cabinet with a machine running MAME inside gets pretty close. The keyboard or a gamepad doesn't compare to a real arcade joystick.

I will take this opportunity to pimp my own cabinet, however I should also note that asking slashdot is a poor substitute for visiting and exploring the resources at Arcade Controls. The maintainer of the site also has compiled much of the knowledge and experience collected there into a nice book. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. If there's something that's not covered, ask in the forums there. It's a far more appropriate place.

UberCade: Taito Arcade Cabinet MAME conversion

BTW, you linked to byoac... but did you some how miss the 900+ projects in the byoac project example pages?

I got a lot of good ideas from this site when I built my cabinet http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade.htm

I think this is the best site out there
http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade.htm
there are a ton of examples

Looks like it's a sly way to say he's got a sweet MAME setup. Apparently, Gauntlet takes a lot of machine to run.

So far he's managed to get several auctions on eBay pulled because they used the word 'Mame' in them.

He's also gone after an arcade art printer as can be seen here:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,32 339.msg276342.html#msg276342
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,32 339.msg276462.html#msg276462

So far he's managed to get several auctions on eBay pulled because they used the word 'Mame' in them.

He's also gone after an arcade art printer as can be seen here:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,32 339.msg276342.html#msg276342
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,32 339.msg276462.html#msg276462

Would this not be signed by his attorney, who might be able to argue that he took his client's word on it (I don't see anything in the declaration about a minimum amount of research needed).

Now if someone were to send a polite and informative letter to his attorney (with a proof of delivery), this attorney could be in a world of hurt if he proceeded.

According to a guy on this thread, this is the attorney.

BYOAC Forum: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,32 339.0.html

This a software list I've started on a new website I'm building. http://buildajukebox.com/content/view/8/26/

You might find something to help you there. Hopefully there'll be no /. effect.

There also a forum at http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,5. 0.html

If you check out the forums as http://www.arcadecontrols.com/ they have a section dedicated speficically to jukeboxes. This includes both hardware and software. If they haven't built/found something, then I'm not sure how feasible it is.

Plenty of inspiration here: (click "examples"):
http://arcadecontrols.com/

And my own pimpage here:
http://benchmark.mameworld.net/cab1/

I can't understand why a lot of people loved this Arcade cabinet stuff.
I began playing old & "free" N.E.S. games. May be some real-like arcade machines may be funny. But I never liked to pay for a noisy and expensive machine.

I suggest Ultimarc's ipac encoder or groovy game gears Key Wiz which is what I used in my mame cabinet, fwiw.

and you'll want the obligatory (and sadly missing from the main post) link to Build Your own arcade controls site and very helpful forum/community

Although I used x-arcade parts on my cabinet, I think you'll be happier in the long run if you order from happs directly or buy happs parts from bob roberts.

e.

I suggest Ultimarc's ipac encoder or groovy game gears Key Wiz which is what I used in my mame cabinet, fwiw.

and you'll want the obligatory (and sadly missing from the main post) link to Build Your own arcade controls site and very helpful forum/community

Although I used x-arcade parts on my cabinet, I think you'll be happier in the long run if you order from happs directly or buy happs parts from bob roberts.

e.

32MB DDR RAM? WTF? DDR won't work on that board, I'm sure!

Yeah, I've always heard that DDR works much better on one of these.

(/me ducks)

He even links to an article for the nespc which used dpp which is a much cheaper alternative (than paying $16 for $3 worth of IC hardware) and also supports numerous controller formats such as NES,SNES,Genesis,Atari,PSX and so on....all through parallel port...
http://www.aldostools.com/dpad.html link to different software used for DPP
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/Mirrors/www.ziplabel .com/dpadpro/construct.html schematics for various interfaces for DPP

You can wire up a joystick and a few buttons to be used to interface an old keyboard into a MAME Machine's arcade control panel.

Hmm.. You mean like this type of stuff?

Sorry, it's being done, and has been for years. Next idea.

MAME Cabinet! :)

We had one at our old office and it really helped cut down on stress.

DirectPad Pro for windows does this nicely. Schematics on the site.

Note: due to use of parallel port, NT/2K/XP may not properly support it. I cannot test, as my laptop (only XP box) has no parallel port). My NES controller works great on an old 98 box tho.

(Site is a mirror, as unfortunately EFP stopped support/development long ago)

Why pine away... just build one =) (or convert one --> UberCade: Mame Taito cabinet conversion

As mentioned ealier Build your own arcade controls (be sure to check there forum, where helpful folks like me will help you along with your project... hey quit snickering!)

Also of note is the new "how to" book by the guy who runs byoac... (with my referral link included of course =P ) PRoject Arcade Book

*Shrug* or you could *shudder* use an x-arcade desktop controller if you can't fit a full sized cabinet, or cocktail, or cabaret cabinet in your pad...

e.

I wrote a tutorial a while back on building one of these control panels, and also building a cabinet to go with it. It's really very easy to wire up, you can see the buttons on the page linked in the story.

There are also lots of examples to follow on Build Your Own Arcade Controls. The pages linked from here run the gamut from throwing a joystick and a few buttons into an old 1970's speakerbox to elaborate 4-player setups with plexiglass and full-color artwork that look like they were hand-crafted by the engineers at Capcom. If any of you out there are entertaining the idea of building a joystick or arcade cabinet, BYOAC is a must-read even if some of it is outdated.

Please check it out, because it's a great project to do, and it's very simple,

Not necessarily. It can be a lot of work if you want it to come out looking nice. OTOH, if beauty is no object, you can indeed slap one together in an evening in the woodshop.

these X-Arcade and Hotrod guys are just raping people; you can build one of these dual sticks for about 20 dollars, and it's a lot of fun.

Yes, I will agree that building your own control panel is a lot of fun. I built a one-player panel a few months ago and I love it. It came out much better than I anticipated and looks very professional.

However, I'm going to flat-out disagree that a stick like the X-Arcade costs $20 to make. If you set out to build your own like it, you'd find that just the joysticks and buttons alone are going to cost more than $20. Now figure in the cost of lumber, formica, keyboard encoder (at least $30 there), and any tools that you don't already own and you're looking at up to around $200 for a sturdy, nice-looking 2-player control panel. And even that isn't counting what your time would be worth.

I did the math before I built my stick and I found that buying 2-player X-Arcade would have been a lot cheaper than building my own single-player version. But would I be able to glance at it every now and then and go, "damn, that looks nice and I even built it myself"? No. Would I get to build something cool and a little geeky from scratch with my own two hands? No.

These things were important to me, but there are probably lots of other people out there who just want an arcade joystick to play on. For them, the X-Arcade is practically a bargain.

Oscar Controls makes spinners (even a Disc of Tron push/pull spinner!) for MAME cabinet purposes.

All high quality stuff, and Oscar has been a great contributor to the Build Your Own Arcade Controls community (msg board) All the above links are great for info on making mame cabinet, desktop controller or otherwise interfacing "real" arcade controls with your PC.

e.

There are a couple of machines manufactured that play classic games via emulation, and I believe that the games themselves are either licensed or no suitable copyright owner could be found. Ultracade is one of them (site requires Flash and is annoying as hell; visit this site for a picture of the cabinet and description). I *believe* that there is another, but I cannot remember the name of it now.

And then there is the venreable ArcadeControls.Com with a hundred or so examples of home-built MAME machines.

As mentioned BYOAC(Build Your Own Arcade Controls) Is a great site for MAME cabinet related information.

For a $1000 cabinet, you'd be better off buying the Slikstik cabinet, though, keep in mind that the wood and other materials needed to build only the cabinet cost about $150 or perhaps far less if you use a painted cabinet rather than using laminates or melamines and take off the coin door.

I spent a total of about $1600 building my cabinet from scratch, but that includes all hardwareincluding the new 27" arcade monitor, computer hardware, and controls.

Just set a budget (both for your money and your time) and buy the best stuff you can. The cabinet takes the most time to build, followed by the control panel; however building vs buying a cabinet is where you will save the most money. The other good option is to buy (or often times get for free) non working machines from a local amusement vendor and restore them, then fit your own cpanel to them. This has the greatest cost/time benefit for you; plus you can recycle. The drawback is that you don't get the flexibility that building whatever you want brings you.

The maintainer of the BYOAC website is putting out a 500+ page book on the cabinet building subject, so it might be worth getting one of those when it comes out before you make any decisions..

~GoRK

Save your link-whoring, Commander. Build Your Own Arcade Controls lists hundreds of documentary pages written by people who've built their own acrade machines or controls.

I finished my own professional-looking arcade control panel with real arcade machine parts just last week, but I haven't had time to post the info to my website just yet. For those looking for the ultimate arcade experience, you can't beat the feel of the real thing.

ArcadeControls.com (BYOAC site) for shame!

And man is the x-arcade "cabinet" just an ugly expensive bookshelf for a TV and PC with a shelf for one of their undersized controllers, or what?

E.

PS I of course like my cabinet better: UberCade =P

If only there was a decent MAME controller for it withh all the buttons and lever in the rigth place....

www.arcadecontrols.com

Hell, build yourself a whole cabinet while you're at it. I did.

All of this information can be collected for free (and in greater detail, I imagine) on the net. I mean, give me a day on google and a few hours to format it all into a nice pdf, and I could publish a cafepress book with the same info.

You know what I would give to have a whole day to research some of this stuff? Some of us have (more than) full-time jobs, families, kids, etc. I don't always have time to put in a lot of research before I tinker around with something. The book sounded interesting to me just based on the introduction to circuits and soldering, something I've never really done much with in the past.

I say go ahead and try to publish a book on the same subject. Better yet, post some links to some of this information. Spend a day if you have to. I'll check back tommorow ;)

(I'll get you started: ArcadeControls.com for the MAME cabinet)

I think you meant http://www.arcadecontrols.com, right?

Make sure to check the forums.