Arcade Machine

A cold winder day at the tail end of the old millennium, Chrutil said to himself: "Man, I totally need to build myself an arcade machine."

This was back when Mame started to make some buzz, and it was clear that with some effort I could have a full blown arcade machine right at home in my living room. A year or so later, I started seriously planning the thing, and I went out and spent a couple of hundred bucks on joysticks, buttons, a keyboard and a trackball controller.

The I started designing the ultimate arcade machine, making drawing in both AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max, but eventually not actually building anything.

Time goes by, and every now and then I'm thinking I should start building that thing.

It's now late summer 2009, and I'm about to have six weeks off work, while my wife is working and the kids are in school. Totally set to ignore the bulk of my wife's task list of stuff to fix in the house, I'm ready to finally build myself an arcade machine. No, wrong - The Ultimate Arcade Machine.

I spent the first two weeks of my sabbatical researching software options, making drawings and renderings, planning wiring, control panel layouts and all that stuff.
Then a number of Home Depot runs later I spent the next two weeks building the piece of pure awesomeness you can see below.

When people see it they ask - wow cool, you have an arcade machine. What game is it?

With a smug smile I reply: "All of them.". That's right - this thing hosts literally thousands of arcade games - pretty much every known arcade game from the mid seventies up until the late 90's.

Computer: Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Memory: 512MB
Graphics: ATI Radeon 9700
OS: Windows XP
Arcade Software: Mame32 0.106
Pinball Software: Future Pinball
Frontend: GameEx
Trackball: Happ USB Trackball, translucent blue with backlight
Joysticks: Wico 8-way joysticks.
Buttons: Happ buttons of various colors