MAME cabinets help

[noyce]

I am in the process of having a home cinema room built at the end of the garden and am planning on having an arcade machine in it. A friend of mine was telling me about MAME (multiple arcade machine emulator) and that you can get arcade cabinets which house a pc enabling you to run games through MAME.

Does anyone know of a good UK supplier for these cabinets?

Any help much appreciated.

[peterc]

no real suppliers of ready built cab's, the way its usually done is to buy an old 2nd hand cab and do it up yourself, like i did! :-) only thing is i'm having probs with an old sound card working with the flavour of mame emulator i like to use..

[uczmeg]

There is a guy on the llamasoft forums who offers ready built MAME cabs.

The forums now live at:

www.yakyak.org (http://www.yakyak.org/)

Post a question in the Bleatings group. I think they were £750...

Cheers
Marc

[peterc]

yikes! 750quid? thats terrible, you can get all the parts for 100 quid if you don't mind fixing the odd duff monitor problem

[uczmeg]

That is for a fully built and setup cabinet with the PC.

Sorry I read the post again and this isn't quite what the original poster was after.

Quite high, but with a decent PC and for a decent cabinet, if you can't do the work yourself it isn't that bad...

Cheers
Marc

[peterc]

i guess thats not as bad with a pc included, but still 750 is a lot of money for a bit of retro gaming, seeing as a lot of us do have machines knocking baout that could run the mame emu fine...

[uczmeg]

I believe he sets it up to play other more power hungry emulators too, but didn't look in depth as I'm not in the market.

If price is problem you can pick up Jamma cabs all over the place and then get the necessary parts to build a MAME to JAMMA pc interface. Arcade sites sell them too (Jamma cabs), but they tend to cost more.

I know www.arcadewarehouse.com does them for around £250. Crap website, but we're just doing the new one for them which will be lovely!

Might be getting a little hardware out of the job too... ;-)

Cheers
Marc

[peterc]

ah i see, but isn't that a bit of a grey area..? the supplying an mame with roms..? or maybe he just supplies the cab with emulator..?
but any way, i took the 2nd option what you mentioned, and got an old jamma cab for 30quid and done it up, then put my own computer with emulator in, bonus!
if you get the chance with the job, crack on mate! its a right good laugh putting a mame cab together!

[uczmeg]

Well part of the payment is a rather overpiced USA Classic cocktail cabinet (they hand build them new).

I was thinking of putting a PC in that. A bit more of an expensive case than yours(!), but reasonably wife friendly. She is even picky about what I put in my home office...

Cheers
Marc

[noyce]

Thanks for the links and advice. I'm not 100% sure which route to take yet but i'll keep you posted.

Do you have any photos of the one you built? I would be interested to see it.

[peterc]

uczmeg,
i totally understand about the wife friendly thing, my gf at the time didn't really want the full up right machine to be in the living room, but the bottom line was, my house, i'll do what i want! heh :-)
But yeah the cocktail cab's are very cool also, i was thinking about that at one point, as it can be some where to put your beer as well! ;-)

noyce
i'll have a look to see what pics i have on my machine of my cab, if i don't have anything good i'll get a couple more done for you

[peterc]

Some pics of my cab as a work in progress, these pics taken shortly after i got the cab and got a computer hooked up to it, but the computer was still not striped and lived out side the cab for the first few weeks until i got it fine tuned

[peterc]

Pete's work in progress cab pics #2

[peterc]

Pete's work in progress cab pics #3

[DSM]

My mate has 2 x 20" Goliath (jamma) cabs working and they are in West London going cheap about £75 each and in good condition they were mine and are two player cabs, this guy could help you with mame conversion advice/make up leads etc his email is : maximum-g@gmx.net ;)

[peterc]

argh! west london! thats where i am, and i had to go 60 miles north of here to get my cab! gutted

[noyce]

Thanks for all your help. It's nice to find a forum that has some helpful people on it.

Those pictures are great!!!!! Seeing those pics has made me want one really bad!!!!!

[peterc]

no prob's about the pics noyce, any questions you have i'd be pleased to help more,
i kinda went off mine for a little while with the sound prob's i was having but, now i'm ready to go again, just gotta love bomberman arcade version! :-)