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Harrison
4th January 2007, 00:41
How many of you have a dedicated emulation system at home setup with all of the best emulators and rom collections so that all the greatest games are ready and waiting for you to play them?

I know that DC has one, and I do too. I was wondering if anyone else also has one.

Have you ever been tempted to build your own arcade machine? A MAME cabinet. Getting hold of an old real arcade machine and refurbishing it and converting it over to run with a PC inside, or building one from scratch?

AlexJ
4th January 2007, 10:41
Working on it at the moment, not too sure about putting it in a cabinet yet for space reasons, but want to get a machine set up that will be primarily for emulation and have a hard disk full of classic games to play.

Demon Cleaner
4th January 2007, 12:09
Yep, I still have my barebone with all my emulation, Competition Pro stick and my X-Arcade. I use it mostly for updating though, but if I really need it, I know that it's there ;)

I will post a screenshot here of my desktop, so people can see what is installed, though only showing the icons on the desktop of emulators that actually are running, not what's ALL installed.

I would like to have a cabinet, already thought of buying one through XGaming, but shipping from the US to Europe?? I cannot built one by myself, I don't have the ability to.

But as I already mentioned, I would need some spare space at my home to install one, and for which use? Probably none. But as we are a bit the same Harrison, you understand what I mean :D

LowercaseE
4th January 2007, 13:25
I wouldn't mind having one system strictly for games, but I just don't have the money or space to do it at the moment. My current PC has plenty of space on it though and I have lots of full ROM sets loaded: Amiga, SNES, NES, Genesis, Atari, Commodore 64, TG16, etc.

Harrison
4th January 2007, 13:39
Having the space to situate an arcade cabinet is definitely the biggest problem. That is why I dismantled my self built cabinet a couple of years ago. It was huge and used up a lot of space. It ended up being the garage unused and eventually I dismantled it completely.

I am hoping to find the time to build a new smaller one at some point this year. The biggest difference will be to use an LCD instead of a CRT monitor. This has the disadvantage that my lightgun won't work any longer, but it's a small price to pay for the amount of room saved and there are not that many lightgun games for the PC or in MAME. I can always hook the gun up to a different system with a CRT when I wish to play those.

When I eventually get round to begin making the new system I will document the build and post it's progress on the forum as I go. This time I want to really take time to make it as nice as I can and even include a working coin slot with it's coin return buttons linked to the MAME add coin function. I also want to design full cabinet art transfers and get them professionally printed out to stick to the sides of the cabinet. I didn't try that with my original cabinet, that was just spray painted black and made from particle board. I also want to make it out of decent materials this time and will utilise my parents large garage to build it (if they will let me, or when they are on holiday ;) ).

As for using the system, I would definitely get a lot of use out of it. Having a dedicated MAME cabinet definitely makes you play the games a lot more than just having the emulators on a normal PC.

Demon Cleaner
4th January 2007, 14:49
Having a dedicated MAME cabinet definitely makes you play the games a lot more than just having the emulators on a normal PC.
That's indeed true.

Demon Cleaner
4th January 2007, 16:06
Here's an actual screenshot of my dedicated emulation barebone system (could call it DEBS :)), in 1024 pix, in 1280 pix you wouldn't probably recognize the icons.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/cioprgr/desktop3.png

You can click to enlarge ;) (just in case)

Harrison
4th January 2007, 16:51
Very nice collection of emulators indeed.

How come you have MAME 0.106 as well as the latest one installed?

Demon Cleaner
4th January 2007, 17:31
How come you have MAME 0.106 as well as the latest one installed?
:) I know you would ask. Because 0.106 is the last one to use scanlines.

Harrison
4th January 2007, 17:33
Ah, I see. Makes sense.

Demon Cleaner
5th January 2007, 06:52
I just added Applewin, didn't have an AppleII emu installed yet?? Also added a nice Infocom emu called Frotz.

Harrison
5th January 2007, 14:45
I tried AppleII emulaton out a long time ago, but not since. That system was quite ahead of its time when for sale. I never saw one in the UK, but I know it was very popular in the US and has a lot of software and games.

It always reminds me of the first National Lampoon film for some reason because they are using an AppleII at the start of the film when he plots their road trip.

Demon Cleaner
5th January 2007, 14:54
Applewin works fine, I played Mask of the Sun this morning, my favorite C64 adventure game at the time.

I just updated again with all the fruit machine emulation, hadn't installed that yet.

Harrison
5th January 2007, 15:12
Fruit machine emulation is strangely addictive. I've never been that interested in real fruit machines in pubs and shops, but the video game versions always get me hooked. Even the fruit machine games on Amiga had me playing for hours. Maybe it's because you can enjoy them without the worry of losing lots of actual money!

J T
5th January 2007, 17:00
I tried AppleII ...

It always reminds me of the first National Lampoon film for some reason because they are using an AppleII at the start of the film when he plots their road trip.

Ha! Yes, quality! That's the bit when the map is shoing the route they will take and the kids start chasing the car with pac-man and space invader like things using the joysticks. I love the National Lampoon's Vacation films.

Puni/Void
5th January 2007, 17:19
Hehe.. the National Lampoon's Vacation films are quite cool! :D I remember Chevy Chase's kid in one of the movies asking another kid: "Do you have Asteroids?" and the kid answers something like "I dunno, my shit hasn't been that hard lately" :D Well, it is funny when you see it. Poor kid was thinking about the classic Asteroids game. :D

Submeg
4th February 2007, 01:59
I cant stand the Lampoon movies....my dad loves it, but I just cant watch that stuff.

v85rawdeal
4th February 2007, 09:19
I am slowly working on it at the moment, using the Japanese PSP as the system, but am also looking at getting another cheap PC to use as well.

Submeg
4th February 2007, 14:05
You know, I am quite tempted to do this. Not really keen on the cabinet, but having full sets would be awesome....would need a joystick like the ones they use in arcade games, thats they only piece of hardware I dont have. An if it was to be purely a gaming machine, I would probably buy a new laptop, would make it alot easier.

Harrison
5th February 2007, 01:42
If you want an arcade quality joystick then there are too good standalone arcade controllers worth getting. These are called Hotrod and X-Arcade.

Both look very similar with two sets of controls (joystick + arcade buttons) and a player 1 and 2 button. I personally think the X-Arcade is better overall.

The Hotrod uses real arcade buttons and joysticks, and has 7 buttons for each player, plus the 1 and 2 player buttons and pinball buttons mounted on the sides towards the back (which can be hard to use). It's configuration is however fixed to its premapped key layout so the emulator either need so have direct support built in, or the ability to learn the hotrod's key map.

Unlike the Hotrod, the X-arcade uses it's own make of arcade sticks and buttons instead of real arcade conponents, but they feel just as good and are as well made and contructed. It also has an extra 8th fire button per player. The X-Arcade also has the advantage of fully programmable buttons that can be mapped to any keyboard key if needed, along with the ability to store a number of your own defined keymaps in its memory. WinUAE also has direct X-Arcade support built in, as does MAME. And The X-Arcade also has pinball buttons, but these are mounted on the sides towards the front and are much nicer to use than the Hotrods, and are great for playing Visual PinMAME and other pinball emulators.

http://www.xgaming.com/graphics/newimages/twoplayer1.jpg

http://www.x-arcade.com/

http://www.hanaho.com/Products/HotRodJoystick.php

As well as a Slikstik classic controller I also have an X-Arcade controller and think it's great. I used it with my PCs when I don't have time to setup the full cabinet Slikstik controls and it is a great unit. Very strong and robust, small enough to store when not in use, but large enough for two players to comfortably use together.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 01:52
Wow, thanks Harrison they are cool! Wish I had the money to build my own cabinet, but first I need a decent system. How do you guys recommend I go about this? Use a laptop or a computer? And what specs should I have? What OS?

Harrison
5th February 2007, 02:08
You don't need a state of the art PC for emulation. My emulation system is an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1GB of ram running Windows XP. Any system over 2GHz with 512MB of ram will run most emulators perfectly. Also the graphics card doesn't need to be cutting edge by today's standards either. Mine is using an ATI radeon 9800 Pro.

For an emulation system I would personally go for a full computer instead of a laptop. The main reason is you can locate the arcade controls right in front of the monitor. You could also make it look authentic by running the graphics through an older CRT monitor instead of an LCD as the older lower resolution arcade games do look better on a CRT than an LCD.

The other advantage of a full computer is you can upgrade it later, add more hard drives to store more rom sets etc... It would also work better in a cabinet if you did decide to make one at a later date, or get hold of an old real arcade cabinet and convert it.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 02:20
So how big would a HD need to be to run:
-Amiga
-NES
-SNES
-Arcade?

Harrison
5th February 2007, 02:34
If you wanted to hold the compete rom sets for each you mean?

If you were not going to store the CD based games then a 200GB HD would be enough for those 4 systems. However if you did want to have every Amiga game then you would be looking at more as the full Amiga set with all CDTV, CD32 and other Amiga CDs will easily fill 300GB. Without the CD based games 200GB HD would be fine.

The best place to have a look to get an idea of the HD space needed for different rom sets is pleasuredome.org.uk as they list the complete sets.

The other issue is that once you get into emulation and have a few full sets, then you will want more. N64 for example which fills roughly 7 DVDs or 22GB. Or CD based games systems, which fill a lot more.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 02:35
:o Woa, thats a lot of stuff. How expensive are large HDs these days? We should have a thread for part costs somewhere...

Harrison
5th February 2007, 02:37
250GB HD is about £40-50 at the moment I think. Seagate is probably the best make to go for, although Maxtor have always been good for me.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 02:38
Thats an alright price, hope they are around that mark down here

Harrison
5th February 2007, 02:42
If you are building a new system then try to go for SATA Harddrives as they save a lot of hassle. No jumper settings are correct positions needed on any IDE cables. You just connect the SATA cable and power to the drive and it works.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 02:45
I just remembered that my sis is getting a laptop so the comp that used to in her room is going to replace the 500 MHz one that is sitting in the study collecting dust. But that one is only 850 Mhz, so I'll have to look into buying a new comp

Harrison
5th February 2007, 10:01
850MHz is fast enough for most emulation though and would lend itself well to MAME and other 8-bit and 16-bit system emulators. Running Windows 2000 on a PC of that speed would be best as XP would use up too many system resources.

It would probably struggle with some of the more recent 3D based systems, and the more recent games MAME supports, but everything else would work fine.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 11:26
What games are we talking? Like PSX games?

Harrison
5th February 2007, 12:45
It may have trouble with PSX emulation, but I did used to run ePSXe emulation on a 400 MHz P2 and it could nearly keep up, so a PC twice as fast might be OK, as long as its graphics card was ok too. I would still expect it to have some slowdown.

MAME also supports some 3D systems, include the arcade version of the Playstation that ran the Tekken and Soul Edge games. There are also other more recent systems it supports that a slower PC would struggle with.

Other systems such N64 might be OK at lower resolutions. Sega Saturn and Dreamcast emulation would probably both not run too well. Basically anything from the 32-bit or newer era might have some problems or be too slow to have fun.

If you were looking to build a new system then the socket 939 Athlon 64 range is new very affordable. You can get an AMD64 3200+ for £43.

Submeg
5th February 2007, 21:14
Cool cool. So what kind of games are running on MAME? The old old games,but also the new games such as Tekken...

Harrison
6th February 2007, 17:16
MAME emulates a LOT of Arcade machines. It supports arcade games from the start in the 70's up to 2005. Most of the arcade games from the start up to the mid 90's are emulated perfectly, whereas some of the newer games included don't currently work perfectly and their emulation is still being perfected as newer versions of MAME get released and so how well they work is constantly being improved. At the moment you can perfectly emulate 5677 games out of the 6437 total that MAME supports.

Many of the games that are currently flagged as "not working" will actually work too. They just give some graphical or audio glitches. Some don't have any sound or some are missing textures or lose graphics for a few seconds as you play.

If you only installed MAME as the only emulator on their PC it would still take you a very long time to play every game it supported! 6437 games is a lot to get through! :lol:

Submeg
6th February 2007, 23:29
:o....6...4...3..7...games.......

Harrison
7th February 2007, 00:13
Can you now see why we like MAME so much! ;)

Having nearly every Arcade game at your disposal is an amazing thing.

AlexJ
7th February 2007, 00:21
A number which just keeps on growing as well:

http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/5673/mamechart0112thumbux8.jpg

Submeg
7th February 2007, 02:55
Yea I see that now....wow. Looks like Im gonna need a new comp....

Demon Cleaner
7th February 2007, 06:30
Nice history graphic, I started with v0.31 back then.

Harrison
7th February 2007, 13:03
I started with the first public release, whichever version that was. I know the 0.1 releases were not public (AFAIK).

I also remember it was much harder to find the rom sets back then. I think I only had around 30 or 40 rom sets for MAME to begin with.

J T
7th February 2007, 14:18
A lot of that 6-thousand+ are clones and regional variants, though.

Still, it is a shed-load of games. I have a fairly recent MAME set and have to say I had a play around, but haven't really gotten into it all that much. Maybe becuase I never actually went to any real arcades (and also don't have a proper game controller for my PC).

Demon Cleaner
7th February 2007, 14:21
Maybe becuase I never actually went to any real arcadesYep, that's the main reason I like MAME that much, I went a lot to the arcades at our local fair, and that was mainly because there wasn't any consoles or computers released those days. We only had a Videopac G7000, nothing compared to the real arcade games.

Harrison
7th February 2007, 17:05
The same for me. Although I had home computers, and the home conversions of many arcade games, none of them were ever as good as the Arcade originals and I would visit the arcades regularly to play them and also to play the latest games that were far more advanced than any home system could manage.

I think it must be different for anyone who didn't really visit the arcades as for me it is nostalgia as much as anything else. And also the ability to play the games again without them costing money, allowing me to see further into them.

AlexJ
7th February 2007, 17:48
A lot of that 6-thousand+ are clones and regional variants, though.

Yeah there's only 3000-odd unique games :lol:

I got into computers just as the home computers were starting to get the edge on the arcades, so didn't spend much time there but there's plenty of good MAME games to try.

Submeg
7th February 2007, 21:59
I will look into it, once I have a decent computer. Oh and we are getting broadband....FINALLY! :biggrindance:

Harrison
7th February 2007, 23:20
At last you are getting broadband! How many years have you been waiting? What finally convinced your dad to get it?

Submeg
8th February 2007, 00:52
Oh only about three years....dont know, think it might of had something to do with my sis getting a laptop and the fact that I was sitting on it doing reviews and reseraching and playing games in the arcade :D

Demon Cleaner
8th February 2007, 08:43
So you're sister is the preferred one in the family. Shame, isn't it? You're the strong gender!!

Submeg
8th February 2007, 13:00
No its because things always take longer for me, being the older child. So when things happen for her it happens quicker (ie getting a laptop) so then he thinks "Oh we should get broadband now!" So frustrating!

Harrison
8th February 2007, 14:25
What was the excuse before now as to why you couldn't have broadband?

Submeg
8th February 2007, 22:06
Oh because he thought it was too expensive. Which I actually agree with him, it was pretty ridiculous, but these days its getting better

AlexJ
8th February 2007, 22:18
Oh because he thought it was too expensive. Which I actually agree with him, it was pretty ridiculous, but these days its getting better

Wow, the UK does actually have an advantage over Aus! BB here has been the same price as dialup with most companies now for several years.

Submeg
8th February 2007, 22:26
Yea its all a bit weird down here...they are just crazy when it comes to broadband prices....it seems they think its some "new" technology and that we should have to pay out our ass for it

Harrison
9th February 2007, 01:02
I saw a program the other day that followed a telecoms engineer who was considering moving from the UK to Aus. It was quite surprising to see that Australia is still developing their telecoms networks compared to the UK and is quite a way behind. The surprise was mainly because the UK is always considered (by people in the UK) to be behind many other countries itself.

Maybe this is why broadband in Australia is more expensive? :unsure: There is also the other issue of distance. In the UK most homes are never more than 6KM from the nearest telephone exchange. I doubt that can be said in Australia, especially when you go more towards the outskirts of any large cities or towns.

Submeg
9th February 2007, 01:10
Yea its just lame, but many of the problems were originally caused by the fact that they would have to install lines and you needed a certain amount of people wanting it etc....but now they are just being greedy

Toasty667
2nd May 2007, 16:37
Well at the risk of cutting my fingers off no. I'm good and using machines and not making them. It would be absolutely fantastic and I'd love it but I dont have the knowledge or space sadly. But yes I'd defo like one.

Submeg
2nd May 2007, 23:20
Its not too hard, you just need a massive screen, a few HDs, and a graphics card that will run the older stuff of the PS2. thats about it.

Harrison
2nd May 2007, 23:48
Well, building a full MAME cabinet is a bit harder than that, but the whole point of such a project is the fun had building it, and then the great enjoyment you have playing it.

Equally, just building a computer system is great fun, well I think it is anyway.

Submeg
3rd May 2007, 04:11
Lol, I was being general Harrison :rolleyes: lol

J T
4th May 2007, 15:05
Its not too hard, you just need a massive screen, a few HDs, and a graphics card that will run the older stuff of the PS2. thats about it.

And patience.

Lots of patience.

Bit of helpful advice would also be good, too.

Submeg
5th May 2007, 10:46
and ROMS
nothing works without those! :rolleyes:

Harrison
5th May 2007, 11:49
Unless you build a machine around a real Jamma cabinet and use the original game pcb's with it. But then you are talking serious money for each game and the upkeep of the cabinet.

Submeg
5th May 2007, 23:33
whoa if you could get your hands on that kind of stuff, it would be fantastic. Lol, could you imagine...you walk into an arcade....unplug a machine, pull out the master key, open it.....unplug the wires and take the board....

NOTHING SUSS!:unsure:

Harrison
5th May 2007, 23:46
I think they might notice something was up! :lol:

You can actually find arcade Jamma PCBs for sale for under £40 quite often. Obviously the rarer the game is the more it will command, but there are quite a few collectors of real arcade hardware.

Next time you are on ebay do a search for jamma and you will see what I mean.

Submeg
5th May 2007, 23:56
Sounds pretty crazy, because what happened if it was damaged in transport? :( Pretty risky

Harrison
6th May 2007, 00:24
True, but electronics are not as fragile as many people think, and I expect they are well packaged when sent. Not really that different to any console with a cartridge based media. The Jamma boards just don't have a case around them. They still plug into the cabinet in a very similar way.

Submeg
6th May 2007, 01:02
Yea I guess so, but my mind would be at ease with the addition of a case

StuKeith
22nd August 2007, 21:23
Full on cab here, only £60 atm with ghost and goblins.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/JAMMA-arcade-machine_W0QQitemZ190142559061QQihZ009QQcategoryZ3945QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

toomanymikes
22nd August 2007, 22:33
I have mame on my laptop but i dont think its as good as the real thing. I have a friend who has been looking for a konami turtles arcade machine for years and was thinking of a dedicated mame set in in a cab just to play that game. He was thinking of getting a four person cab like the original so you could also play the konami 4 person arceade games like the simpsons and that cowboy one (cant remember its name).

Harrison
23rd August 2007, 01:17
It is as good as the real think if you have real arcade controls to play it with. That is the one element that makes all the difference. The games are the originals so are identical. It's just getting the physical part to match.

I really need to reassemble my MAME cabinet. It's been sitting in bits for too long.