Slashdot Mirror
All-In-One Arcade Console
ArcadEd wrote in to plug his
Arcade in a Box which is
essentially a PC ready to play MAME, but built into a console with true
arcade parts for the buttons and joystick for a more authentic arcade
video game experience. It's not quite as realistic as, say building your own cabinet, but it
definitely is a lot less time consuming ;)
However I think this *might* miss the boat.
Yes, I have wanted the true arcade experience at home. The rich buy the cabs outright. The crafty either refurb or make their own mame boxes.
But is there enough market for people who kinda want the arcade experience at home, without sweating for it? Aren't they served very well by most consoles?
It seems to me that this is not die-hard enough for the truely rabid arcade fans. However I would love for their sales figures to prove me wrong!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
..are building our own mame cabinet.
/. :-)
Lemme tell you something. There is a lot more pride in building something yourself than going out and buying it premade. You actually work to get it, and there is a special feeling in that.
Right now it's about half completed. We've got TONS of pictures, and I'm making the Mame Cabinet in POV-Ray for kicks. When it's all done, we'll be making a seperate page for it all and hopefully getting it posted on
It's too bad that this is really my friend's cabinet. In a way, I have selfishly acted as if it were my own. It's been such a project for me that I really wanna have one for myself. Unfortunatly it'll take a long time to make another. I don't know if I'll end up buying one or making one...
-PovRayMan
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
Counting all the buttons, joysticks, and trackball, you are running about $150 just for parts. Add wood, paint, and labor, and this guy isn't making a whole lot of profit. I've made a few arcade style joysticks for playstations and they do get expensive.
Want authentic? Do what I do, buy arcade cabinets (real ones) and put games in them (real games). OR do Mame the "Right way". Read on...
Mame is great, and mame is an arcade emulator, however, most people who run mame in an arcade cabinet run it on a PC monitor which is the absolute laziest way of doing it, not to mention the ugliest. If you're not afraid of DOS you can make your DOS mame display on an arcade monitor, which is both authentic and prettier. I mean who has a 38" computer monitor?
Home made cabinets are ASS unless they're designed (DESIGNED, not "based") on real cabinets. Control panels are often too big, monitors are too small. A lot of money went in to the design of the real arcade cabinets, finding out exactly which height was most comfortable (and therefore profitable), which you just can't duplicate with a homemade cabinet unless you use antoher cabinet as a guide. and if you have another cabinet, why build your own.
Buying cabinets is also much cheaper than building them, and much less of a pain in the ass. Arcade Infinity has lots of cabinets that are less than $600. (look for Jamma cabinets in the gallery)
If you're going to do it, do it right. get a J-Pac (www.ultimarc.com), use a computer for the sole purpose of sitting in your mame cabinet, and for God's Sake, please don't build your own cabinet unless you want to watch your friends wince at your effort when you have finished it.
If anyone decides to put together your own MAME cabinet, please, for the love of all things holy, do NOT use a rare classic cabinet to do it in!!! There are a ton of cabinets built for conversion kits, and crappy JAMMA games can be had for $50-$200 in these cabs.
If you come across a classic cabinet in your hunt for a machine to "MAME," please consider restoring it. There are many resources available on the net and usenet for parts and assistance in doing so. I've put many a converted classic back together and it's a real thrill to see a long-dead machine come back from the dead.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
I understand what a patent is and I understand what it is for. I just fail to see anything truely unique in this design. I personally have a problem with a patent system that lets someone make minor changes to something and call it unique, or for that matter patent something generic or in common use. As for prior art I remember seeing sites and having friends build MAME cabinets and such very shortly after MAME came out, and seeing as I don't have a copy of the patent application I can't make a judgement on anything but what I see and I don't see anything that makes this guys MAME console differnt from the one a buddy of mine built a couple years back. But maybe that doesn't exactly meet the legal definition of prior art since it wasn't "published at least 1 year before the patent application or in common use.....blah blah blah". But that is my opinion.
Get an old arcade cabinet ($100 ?). Don't put a CRT in it, use, an old 19" TV ($20). They have the wings on the CRT to be put smack in place. Strip the TV from the box and get the CRT and circuit boards seperate. .28 pitch monitor. Trust me ;) :)) :)
Mount the boards on the side of the arcade cabinet or wherever is safe.
The look and feel from a TV is much less blocky than that from a
It definitely preserves the 80's feeling. I've been running mine on a Pentium 200 for about 4 years now.
Oh and get a TV-out VGA card that does whatever your TV wants or some kind of converter. Playing arcade games in a cabinet is way different from playing on a PC. Get that authentic feeling. Works for me
Joysticks ? get a broken keyboard/new one and find out how the lattice works and solder it into the real ones. The PCB has solder connections... play with it
Hmmmm, I am a worker of ordinary knowledge and from what I see this invention is pretty obvious.
I'll show you how a computer science student with no electrical training could have thought up this mod.
The Apple II, C=64, Amiga, and Atari ST computers had their keyboards built into their cases. Some desktop x86 PC cases, and all notebook computers, are the same way. Call this piece of prior art "Keyboard In PC Case".
Some users have suggested modding a PC keyboard using microswitch buttons from an actual arcade machine, or otherwise connecting a JAMMA joystick to a PC using the PS/2 keyboard interface. Call this "Keyboard With Arcade Buttons".
Keyboard In PC Case + Keyboard To Arcade Buttons = what Ed is selling. Given the design goal "arcade enclosure for a device that runs software designed for Microsoft Windows", and given the prior art, I don't see how anybody with a CompTIA A+ certification could not have come up with such a mod.
Ed, could you provide more information on relevant patents so that we can know what you invented?
Will I retire or break 10K?