Chaos in my lab.

I cleaned up my "lab" a little yesterday... Not that you could tell my looking at it. I've moved the MAME box off the top shelf onto the desk..

I cut up some boxes to make a prototype of sorts.

Here are a few pics of my progress.

My MAMECab Blog...

If you were like me, you spent too much idle time inside of arcades when you were younger.  Another way you might be like me is if you have an interest in building your own MAME cabinet. 

For those of you who don't know what MAME is, MAME stands for Multi Arcade Machine Emulator.

It allows you to play all the oldschool arcade games on a computer!  

I first discovered MAME way back when I played it on my '486!  That gives you an idea of how long its been around.  Very cool.

People have been building their own MAME cabinets since the beginning, but things are getting easier and simpler all the time...

It's time I built one.

Last summer I spotted a 15 inch LCD monitor at a garage sale for five bucks...  I snatched it up, so proud to have scrounged my first bit of my future project.  Kathy thought I was crazy...

Over the last few days, I've been watching Kijiji for someone who is either giving away an old computer or selling it really cheap.

Two days ago, I saw an ad for Pentium 4 computers for sale for 15 dollars!  Score!

Not expecting much, I went to the shop, to ask some questions.  When I started asking about the operating systems, he started showing me other computers for more money.  Saying the $15 dollar ones are as is, no guarantees...  

Since I'm still not sure which OS I'm planning for my MAME, DOS, Win XP, or Linux, I don't really care what it has, I just want to know if it works...

He had a stack of twenty or so so I searched through until I found one that struck my fancy...  I'm not sure why this one turned me on, but I felt lucky.

We plugged it in, and turned it on, and got a memory error, and a keyboard error...  The keyboard error was an obvious fix, attach a keyboard.  The memory error, was a bit of a concern, but I figured I had enough spare parts kicking around home to make it work..

I paid my $15 and headed home..

I hooked up the monitor, and a keyboard and mouse, and the memory error continued but it booted to Windows XP!

I looked in the bios to start setting some things the way I wanted.  Things like the boot order, and a few little things, and discovered I didn't have the password to make changes to the bios.  A quick google search later, and I had a PDF for the motherboard!  

I followed the instructions for resetting the password and shazam!  When I reset the bios to what I wanted, the memory errors were gone!

The other great thing is it booted to XP very quickly!  I wanted to make sure all the XP updates were done, and that it was virus free.

It wasn't.  When I connected it to the network, all of the Microsoft websites were blocked.  A clue that something was up.  

I downloaded some XP updates to my mac, like Windows Malicious Software Removal and tweakUI, and transferred them to the MAME box.  I found one malware, and three viruses.  Even though it looked like a fresh install of XP, it was far from perfect.

I downloaded a few more things, then I installed MAME.  No surprises, it all worked perfectly.

I searched TPB for a good collection of torrents, but they were all huge.  Really huge.  

It got me thinking about what do I want to do with my box?  Do I wan't to play all 9000 plus games that are available?  Or a handful of old school classics that take me back to my youth.  

Old school...  I have a modded Xbox that has a MAME emulator on it, so I simply copied the games from the Xbox to the new machine.

I fired up MAME, with one of the classics, Donkey Kong!  It worked great!

I tweaked the monitor settings to rotate it 90 degrees, hooked up some speakers, and everything worked great! 

So far, I've invested $20 bucks, and I think I have my computer hardware setup!

I don't want to make a monster huge full size cabinet, I want a mini.  I just found this link... http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Mikes_Mini_Mame  Now you get an idea of what I want to make...

I'll write more in a bit...  The boys are calling!