Irish arcade machine builders

As far as i can gather there's no real interest from anybody in power in stopping any private individual from using roms for personal, non commercial use. It's only in cases where somebody is making money off them that development houses and publishers would sit up and take an interest, ie selling mame cabinets full of unlicensed roms for profit without giving the original publisher a cut of the readies.

There's also a counter argument that these roms and their widespread availability recently have directly led to a resurgence in some types of classic games, and are partly responsible for success of their modern sequels and new profits for their owners. For example, the street fighter series has become a cash cow again for capcom recently, after more than 10 years in the commercial wilderness, but it's been played online constantly by a dedicated hardcore of nostalgic fans since it was out of the arcades. It only recently made the jump to 100% legitimate online platforms like XBL or PSN, but it had been played on emulators with roms for ages before that was viable, and many argue that's what kept it alive as a series at all.

I think most people would agree that as long as it's for private home use, and no money is changing hands you're absolutely grand using roms, but if you're not sure there are a handful of copyright-free roms that anybody can use available from the official mame website below. None of them are very good, but at least they're kosher if you're putting a history of your project on the web and don't want to step on anyone's toes.

http://mamedev.org/roms/

By the way, speaking of playing stuff online, just in case you weren't aware, a lot of emulators now have online matchup features built in. It's not something a lot of the cab building guides or project websites tend to mention because of the rom copyright issues etc. but if somebody was not too worried about all that stuff they could make a really cool cab that was wi-fi enabled and could play 2 player games against people over the net on it very easily. If i was building another cab it's definitely something i'd look into .

keithgeo wrote: »

I seen one machine with a coin mech on that had switches behind the lighted up "insert coins" buttons.......Im going to mess around with xp the weekend and and see what needs to be done to customize the boot up etc to block out xp stuff and boot straight into mame.

I think you can get coin mechs that are just leaf microswitches that you can wire into an ipac and set as your 1p coin button. You could also look into just setting mame on freeplay, I think there's a setting for it somewhere.

Be very careful fiddling with your boot sector on your OS. You can brick your computer very easily. There are programs you can use to do it but make sure you know what you're at. It's a good tradeoff to just streamline xp, switch off all the extra background crap, and stick mame in the startup folder with a custom theme on the desktop and the icons switched off.

My cab just goes from the xp boot load screen straight to a black theme I created and auto loads mame (no login, password etc). Setup correctly it takes under 30 seconds to cold boot. Alternatively, you always have the option of just setting the power button to make XP hibernate instead of shut down. It will wake up straight into mame if you do that, and only take a fraction of that time.