My MAME Cabinet project.
I just realized I never posted my MAME cabinet project that I worked on some years ago. I really should get back to it as there's a lot more stuff I could do with this baby.
For those who don't know MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. What it is is a piece of software that runs on your computer and emulates old arcade machine hardware. So it essentially "pretends" to be the hardware that used to be in those venerable old arcade cabinets. Pair this with the software, or ROM, and the game you are running "thinks" it's running on the old hardware, when instead it's running on your home computer. Think of it like this. Pac-Man was written in some language, doesn't matter what, to run on some very specific piece of hardware, the hardware in the Pac-Man arcade cabinet. It was not designed to run on your home computer. So if you took the Pac-Man "software" out of the Pac-Man cabinet and tried to run it on your computer it would have no idea how to make heads or tails out of it. The two are speaking a different language. What the emulator does is it runs on your home computer and essentially pretends to be the hardware that was in the original Pac-Man machine and when you load the Pac-Man "software" it is fooled into thinking it's running on the old hardware, the emulator does the job of doing all the translation. The cool thing about this is that you are running the original software so it's basically pixel, and sound PERFECT to the original arcade.
Of course playing Pac-Man on your keyboard just doesn't have the same feel. So many hobbyists came up with the idea to put their computer in a REAL arcade cabinet and hook up the controls and such to your computer. Bingo you have the old arcade experience.
Mame emulates some 3000+ games now. Anything you can think about from your childhood and MUCH MUCH more is emulated, most of it extremely accurately, or 100%.
Anyway I wanted to build my own MAME cab some years back and below are the fruits of my labour. Still have this beast in the basement. I should put more work into it:
Always hate the sound of my voice
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