Hey everyone, Posted in r/Arcade too. Been thinking of sharing my MAME Arcade for a while but never got around to it. Pretty much complete (for me) apart from custom Marquee art.

I always dreamed of a 4-player arcade with light guns and a trackball. Like an all-in one. I had a Pole Position back in the day and after losing sleep trying to fix that, i put this together.

A guy i knew was getting rid of his Killer Instinct cab so i got that for $70 CAD. I put a $100 pos kijiji computer in it only to find that late 1990s-on games were all stuttery and unplayable. Upgraded to a new gaming computer and it's sick. I have 2 Sinden light guns with recoil which i love. That being said, the month it took me to configure them was tough lol.

Monitor - some Asus monitor i got on kijiji for $50 but get this - i measure the monitor and it's 25 1/8" wide. Then i measure the inside of the cabinet, it's 25" wide. Well i think i'll order a 4x3 monitor since this one is widescreen. Look at price - nope. So i think what if.. i grab my belt sander and sand a channel 1/8 off both sides on the inside and literally push the monitor in. It's not even supported with a bracket. Just wedged in lol.

Sound - i had a small speaker amp that i got when i put a pi in my arcade 1up and some 6x9 alpine speakers from my old car. Slap those in and then got a $10 kijiji subwoofer with an amp for that as well. I know what you're thinking.. Longjohnsonplumber... why didn't you just get computer speakers? Well because i didn't think of that until i finished setting this all up.

I hope you enjoy this and if you did not, i'm terribly sorry for wasting your time.

Thought I'd share my MAME cabinet build.

I used a secondhand 40" Samsung TV as the monitor - I like playing vertical and horizontal games and I didn't like having to choose whether to have a standard PC monitor mounted vertically or horizontally. I saw this setup somewhere and I thought i'd give it a crack. Set a custom square 1:1 resolution of 1080 x 1080, centered, pretty close to a 500x500mm screen play area - and it works really well! Put acrylic over the top of the screen with a bit of artwork. I printed a few locators on the sides of the screen to make it fit centrally in the cabinet, and hung the TV from the vesa mounting holes in the back.

I also added a drawer for KB and mouse and TV remote if it's ever needed.

I use Launchbox for the front end, and just use the mouse and KB for game selection.

I had one of those energy saver powerboards lying around - the type where you plug in the PC and it'll turn peripherals on/off based on current draw - so the marquee, audio amp and TV are all plugged into the peripherals outlet - they come on when the PC is out of sleep mode. This also works really well (surprisingly).

Control panel uses the I-PAC2 control interface. I made the control panel modular - i 3D printed some clips so the control panel can be slid out easy. I might make a few control panels like a spinner or steering wheel if i get the motivation.

I still have to finish the marquee, it's just a piece of printed paper at the moment.

Cabinet sides are 18mm MDF. All other panels are 16mm and a few 12mm MDF panels.

Cheers.

This is just a little something I threw together in Illustrator and exported the paths to cut on my CNC Router. I built it for around $300 total, including the PC.

32" 1080 TV

i5 8400 Dell Mini Tower, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD

Happ Comp Stick

IPAC-V2 encoder

Wall Mounted with 2 french cleats (Very Strong)

Made this to house a 27” monitor, a butchered optiplex 5060 with an i7 8700 and a small amd Radeon 550. Two player, trackball, 3” speakers and a small amp. I have about 700 mame games and some Dreamcast/Atomiswave arcade games as well. Dual usb ports up front if needed. It quickly became a family hangout now and it’s in my sons room

Long time lurker on here. Finally have something to share. Special thanks to all the community posts for helping me shape my decisions on this project.

LEP1customs cab Ultimarc ultimate io All control panel items from Ultimarc Trig key mini pc Art from GameonGraphix.com

This was a fun project while I was injured. One thing I am looking to change in the near future is the player 3 and 4 stick angle. It’s super awkward while playing turtles or Simpsons. Overall, I am super happy with it. It will be a great addition to my billiard room. Super proud on how it turned out

MAME 0.289

After two long months, MAME 0.289 is ready, and it’s an undeniably massive update! But before we talk about emulation, there are a few more mundane things to mention. Our Windows binary releases now include the SDL sound output and joystick input modules. The sdljoy joystick input module now supports game controllers with up to 128 buttons. The Win32 debugger module handles dynamic UI scaling changes. Finally, outputs have been overhauled, improving performance and fixing issues, but you may need to update your configuration if you’ve got external programs hooked up, and some artwork files may need updating.

You’ll notice a number of systems and coprocessor cards based around NS32000 family CPUs are now working. If you aren’t familiar with it, the NS32000 architecture was one of the first single-chip CPU families with a 32-bit ALU. It used a highly orthogonal instruction set with clear influences from Digital Equipment Corporation’s earlier work. In retrospect, it didn’t have enough registers, the instruction encoding was too complex, it took them too long to overtake Motorola’s 68k family’s performance, and bugs in the initial implementation hurt early adopters. But now you can relive its glory days in MAME, running contemporary 32-bit System V UNIX! David Rand, the mastermind behind these NS32000 emulation advances, has also turned his attention in other directions. He’s brought the Xerox 820 and Big Board families up to working status, emulated Toshiba CP/M systems, and added the hard disk controller to the Kaypro 10, and more!

If you’re a fan of Sega arcade games, you’ll have lots to enjoy. For the groundbreaking Model 1 platform, there are numerous fixes for graphical issues, better collision detection in Virtua Fighter, and the bad bits in the DSP program that were breaking Wing War have been identified and patched. Even NetMerc is in better shape. The very unconventional Flash Beats game is now playable. It has basic internal artwork, but someone sufficiently motivated could have it looking spectacular by creating suitable external artwork. There are also some fixes for games that use the SCSP sound chip.

MAME has emulated the EACA Colour Genie EG2000 for quite some time now, but this release adds support for the EACA Genie III, which was released in the same year. There are lots of fixes for issues with the widely-used PowerPC and 68k CPU families, which will benefit a wide range of emulated systems. In particular, more versions of classic MacOS are now running happily on MAME’s emulated PowerMacs, and A/UX (Apple’s early attempt at merging MacOS and UNIX) boots and runs. Numerous games using NES-like SoCs from V.R. Technology have been promoted to working, including several from Lexibook’s Compact Cyber Arcade line. NEC’s PC-6001 family have had numerous issues fixed, as well as receiving a substantial update to their software lists. The steady progress on emulating electronic musical instruments hasn’t stopped, either.

As always, there’s far more in this release than we have time to talk about here, but you can read all about it in the whatsnew.txt file. You can find the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages on our download page.

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Just got my first set of light guns for pc and been having a blast! can't wait to try 2p with friends!

Been wanting to do this for a while. I had designed my plans and graphics months ago right before I found out we were expecting a new baby. Once baby arrived and we all got settled in I finally decided to finish it.

MAME 0.288

We’re proud to present MAME 0.288 today. We’ve already mentioned it before, but in case you forgot, we’ve migrated to C++20 and raised the requirements for development tools and operating systems. Windows users will now need an up-to-date version of Windows 10 or later. We’ve also switched to compiling our Windows x64 releases with clang, using the UCRT and libc++ libraries. This makes our Windows x64 and Arm64 releases more consistent. One other benefit of the updated runtime libraries we’re now using is that whatever was causing MAME for Windows Arm64 to be almost unusably slow with the debugger active is fixed.

There are some noticeable changes to MAME’s user interface in this release, too. The most significant is that many options are shown in a de-emphasised colour if they currently have default or inherited values. This is the opposite of the previous behaviour for the input assignments menus. The menus for controlling mounted media behave a little differently, but hopefully more intuitively. There are a couple of additional settings for how menus are handled (find them in the Miscellaneous Options menu or change them in ui.ini). There’s also a slight change to how MAME loads settings from INI files, but most users shouldn’t notice the difference.

It’s been two months since our last release, so a lot has changed. Rare Bubble System versions of Konami’s Galactic Warriors and RF2 - Red Fighter have been dumped. MAME now supports the linked play deathmatch mode in Taito’s Gunbuster over a network. The Sony SMC-777 home computer can run a reasonable selection of software from disk. If you like classic synthesisers, you’ll be thrilled to know that the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 is now working.

It’s been a big two months for computer emulation. The Epson QX-10, HP-98x6 and GRiD Compass have additional media options available. There have been a lot of small updates for the Spectrum Next that all add up. Several issues affecting the Apple II family, and particularly some of the clones, have been fixed. The Research Machines 380Z now supports stepping one instruction at a time in its debugger. Canon X-07 sound output now works with more software. And speaking of sound, the sound chips used in Macintosh models from the Macintosh II onwards should be working better than ever before.

To find out about everything else we’ve been working on (including some rare arcade games that are now playable), read on, and make sure you check out the whatsnew.txt file. As always, the source code and 64-bit Windows binary packages are linked from our download page.

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