Slashdot Mirror
The Ultimate MAME Box
Strudelkugel writes "Aaron Mahler, director of network services at Sweetbriar College, has built the ultimate MAME box. His site describes his efforts in detail. Lot of cool pics, too."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
...in case it gets slashdotted...
----cut here----
A few years ago I had this sudden desire to start collecting the arcade games I remember from my childhood in the 80's. I'm not completely certain why this notion suddenly took hold of me seemingly out of the blue. Maybe it was the nearly mint Pac-Man machine I kept walking by at the Bistro at Sweet Briar College where I work. It wasn't getting a lot of play there in the late nineties where it had lived a fairly sheltered existance for nearly 20 years.
To some extent I'm certain I had the sudden realization that it might be possible to actually own an arcade game now. I was older and had an income higher than I did when I was ten years old and had to think twice about spending a whole quarter in such a fleeting manner. As a child in the 80's the thought of owning an actual arcade game was somewhat akin to the likelihood that I could take a ride on the space shuttle just by asking nicely. This was a time when the height of excitement was a gradeschool friend having a birthday party that included a set number of FREE tokens for the gameroom at the local Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. The choices and spending power in that couple of hours was overwhelming.
Maybe it was the fact that I grew up immersed in computers and did play a lot games on the Atari 2600, my Commodore 64 or a friend's ColecoVision. This was the era when finding a console version that came close to the real game was a challenge that made the genuine arcades a luxury for their graphical prowess if not the big screen and the neat lighted marquees. There was a certain ambience to an 80's gameroom filled with noisy arcades that added a lot to the experience.
Right about the time I started eyeing the Pac-Man machine I had discovered MAME and was having a nostalgic blast not only with the games I remembered (or knew about and never got to play) but with the very concept of emulation. Those involved in the "emulation scene" will know what I'm talking about here. It becomes addictive in a very strange way. At the time, though, this fascination with emulation simply fueled my desire to own the real thing and fulfill a childhood dream.
In very short order I was absorbing everything I could find online about arcade collecting and was avidly pursuing my first classic machine. I expressed my desire to purchase the lonely Pac-Man machine in the Bistro which likely led to it being added to the next silent auction the college periodically uses to divest itself of various items. In the few months it took before I was able to get the Pac-Man I managed to score a Q*Bert machine from a guy outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. A little while later I located a BurgerTime machine in Richmond, Virginia, then a Gauntlet and a Space Duel cocktail somewhere out in the sticks southwest of here. I was calling various arcade operators all over the place and seeing what they had sitting around from the arcade heyday. Some were being thrown out and others I bought for a song. Unfortunately, I lost count of the number of operators I spoke with that had literally taken dumptruck loads of machines to the landfill in the days or weeks before I got a bug in my butt to obtain them. Afterall, one man's garbage is another geek's nostalgic obsession. It didn't please either of us that they had to pay to dispose of them and I would have paid to obtain them had my wild goose chase begun sooner.
To make a very long story shorter, I owned just over 30 machines by the time that Pac-Man that started it all came into my posession. In the meantime I had bought, repaired, sold and brokered tons of machines.
Now where does one put 30 arcade games? Well, a few of your prized ones you put in your house and try to find a tasteful way to fit them into the decor. They are most definitely not furniture and are hardly compact. Your project machines you stash in your parents' large cinderblock shed/workshop rendering it virtually unusable since the average woodworking endeavor requires more than five square
Here is an article from about a month ago on it.
He *IS* the admin. The website is hosted from his PERSONAL machine. The one he tries to get work done on every single day.
And I am on that network too. Right now I can't even check my email from home. Someone please mirror for us...
Not as cool as this one.
Here's the mirror.
Notes:
Not all of it is downloaded.
In the images gallery, the thumbnails aren't there yet. Most(?) of the full images are, so click on them anyway.
Enjoy.
2) In MAME32, at least, go to Options -> Interface Options and check Skip disclaimer and Skip game info. This should take care of the "OK" problem.
Hope this helps.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
Aaron Mahler's MAME setup was featured as The Infinite Arcade Machine: Building the world's largest video arcade--in your family room (page 2) in the October 2003 issue of Scientific American. Printer-friendly version.
This is nothing new. Check out Arcadecontrols.com . Folks have been building there own arcades for awhile now.
If you want to check out an utlimate Mame box, take a look here:
1UP's Arcade
This dude has a spinning control panel.
I have mirrored it - Here
This won't be around for long - maybe a day or two tops. someone else wnat to mirror from me?
comment directly in my journal
http://freshmeat.net/projects/knoppixmame/
So many times it'll make your head spin.
Ultimate MAME box? That's a bold statement. Granted, it's nice.. but nothing really revolutionary. There are some much better examples of cabinets with original artwork or insane designs such as: 1-up's Pac-Mamea, Mamestation II.. It's a very nice box tho. I'd prefer swappable control panels to a one panel jammed with controls, but eh.. to each his own. For tons of examples, go to Build Your Own Arcade Controls.