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I had already decided that I was
going to have a dedicated PC for this, and that it would strictly run
M.A.M.E.
No other console emulators would be used. Why, you may ask? This is an
arcade machine. These are games which were really housed in arcade
machines at one point, so putting them back into their natural habitat
just made sense. As cool as playing a console (NES, Sega, PSX, etc…) in
a real arcade box may be, it's not what I wanted to do with this project.
I started looking around for a cheap PC that would be able to run most of
the M.A.M.E. games smoothly, and ended up getting a killer deal on a
refurbished 300Mhz eMachines PC through an auction at Egghead!
Then about a year later, someone at work was getting rid of an old PC
motherboard, so I upgraded. Here is my configuration as of
September, 2001
- 400Mhz Celeron processor
- 192M Ram
- 16M Phoenix Video
- 4.2GB Hard Drive
- 24x CD Rom Drive
- Win98
The original 300Mhz I had in there did a very nice job. The extra
speed with the 400, and a step on on the video card have increased the
quality quite nicely! Most of the games I play now work really
well! I really liked Tim
Eckel's Arcade@Home front-end for the DOS version (forget the 32-bit version of MAME on a
400Mhz machine…too slow), so that's what I stuck with. I've read nothing
but rave reviews about ArcadeOS as a DOS front-end, but I wanted the
Windows environment for the first go at it. (*Note: If I were going to
build one with a real Arcade monitor, I would
certainly go with ArcadeOS).
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Introduction
Computer
Cabinet
Monitor
Control Panel
Finishing Touches
Final Product
Costs
Credit & Thanks
Useful Links
