MAME Cabinet: Part 1

I’ve always been obsessed with everything 80s; the music, the fashion and of course the games. It’s the era video games began and arcades were common-place. Today however, nobody visits the arcades and they have almost all died off. Systm did a series on building a MAME cabinet. Since watching this series, I felt that this is something that we [my dad & I] could do; and this summer it’s what we have, and shall be doing.

The first thing we needed to acquire was an ‘old’ computer. Over the years we had given many of ours away, so it wasn’t difficult to get one back; an old Olivetti with a Pentium MMX processor, 64MB of RAM and a 4GB HDD, of which 2GB was eaten by Windows 98. Obviously MAME was the first thing we needed to get up and running on the machine. One of the issues we had was the lack of USB support for pen drives. Intially, we burned discs to combat this, but this proved both timely and costly and we soon searched for a driver. Now that our movent issue was sorted, we tried to get MAME running.

Best OS EVAR

MAME just would not run on the old Olivetti, and so our hopes of trying to get an arcade machine on the cheap [free] were shattered. This wasn’t really any issue for dad and I but mum was certainly pissed about having to spend money on what she thought was another one of my dad’s stupid schemes (personal mug, garden toys etc.). He found someone in the Trade-It and gave them a ring, to ask about a computer. The call, I imagine, went something like this:

We ate dinner, and made our way over to the other side of Bristol (’The Norf’). The estate that the guy lived on was a bit of a mess if I’m honest, and it was the kind of place that you wouldn’t want to keep your car parked there for too long if you don’t have to. The ‘Ginger Guy’s’ house wasn’t too much better either. A rusty fridge littered the outside of his house and Dad, ‘The Ginger Guy’ and myself had to squeeze into what was at one point in time a cupboard. The cupboard had been converted into a smoking den workshop and was rummage of old computer parts, cables, and cigarettes. What should’ve been a five-minute-pickup-and-dash was quickly turning into a thirty-minute-chat-and-’is there anything else?’ kinda thing. We finally got computer, and battled our way past screaming children and a mouthy wife to the car.

All we needed to do now was configure the software, get an interface and buttons, and build a machine – not a lot.