Building an Arcade Machine

neon_glows

I read an article in a magazine about building your own arcade machine using an old PC, due to the fact i have a shed full of old PCs iv decided to give it a shot, i want to srtart with the software first, iv lost the magazine but im almost sure it used a program called mame for running and downloading the games, is this right and does mame work as its own operating system and what sort of specs should i be looking at?

neon_glows

Even better does anyone know what actual operating system if any did old arcade machines run?

I am MAN

Sounds interesting but where would you get a big funky arcade box?

Mr E

MAME is an emulator that runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. Its freeware, and is available from here: http://www.mame.net

Google for ROMs (the games).

neon_glows

Yeah i was thinking that mame possibly ran inside windows but i tuat there was a version that was its own operating system altogether, in the magazine they built there own case and aparently the older the monitor the better, special one with a bubble in it!

Im terrible at building things but im hopuing to find some one to do all the wood stuff for me, also there is an arcade place where im from and maybe they may give me an old box

neon_glows

maybe this shoul now be moved to modding and tweaking, lol

Khannie

Check on ebay. There is lots of stuff that you can buy. Old arcade cases, etc.

Mame does need an OS. You can get some pretty lightweight linux's though if your machines are very old.

neon_glows

ah its just when its all locked up inside the arcade box i want the screen to act and seem as real as possible, im also going to lan the arcade machine to my main gaming tower which is hooked up to broadband so i can download and transfer the games accross automaticaly!

Blisterman

www.arcadecontrols.com has everything you'll need to know.

Len_007

Just lash a modded x-box in. That would do for mame & SNES, and halo! I'm sure there is an arcade style controller you could buy too

Zapho

Well a guy I know in college did the same thing. He got an old enough machine, it was a pentium 166mhz which is fine, cuz all of his games are pre 1992. I think it had 16mb ram and a 2 gig harddrive. It ran mame but I couldn't tell you if it was its own os or if it was windows based. I'm sure you can find an os free version but then I doubt you'll be able to LAN it, so for the time being work with the windows one. Next he go himself an oldish arcade machine, which still worked. He wired the joystick and buttons into the keyboard and somehow managed to hook up the monitor to the pc. In the end, he had an arcade machine that played hundreds of games!

Tom Dunne

I remember reading about this in PCW magazine. They had an old DOS based computer that they re-configured to boot off a Compact Flash card (can't remember why, but there was good reason).

It used Mame (the DOS version, of course) and they put a load of games onto it. Looked v. cool.

zilog_jones

Zapho wrote:

Well a guy I know in college did the same thing. He got an old enough machine, it was a pentium 166mhz which is fine, cuz all of his games are pre 1992. I think it had 16mb ram and a 2 gig harddrive. It ran mame but I couldn't tell you if it was its own os or if it was windows based.

Pre-1992 games? I think not. A P166 would only be able to play most 70's and early 80's games - very few 16-bit games or anything past about 1985/6. And only with a really old version of MAME. REALLY OLD.

I have a PIII 933MHz and it struggles playing certain mid-80's arcade systems, but most stuff is playable up to Neo-Geo and CPS2 stuff. Don't even think about any 3D games though!

A PII should be fine for the majority of 8-bit systems and simpler 16-bit systems in MAME, but don't expect anything amazing.