My Arcade Cabinet

For many, many years I always wanted my own arcade machine and for a long time I was thinking about building my own cabinet either from scratch or from the remains of a dead cab. I spent ages reading books and looking on the net trying to learn everything I needed to start the build (BYOAC was a great source of info - link at the bottom). The problem was I always found something got in the way of me actually starting chopping up wood, with the biggest issue being where could it go once I'd finished.

Then last year, a guy at my work recommended a company on eBay who were selling reconditioned machines running MAME for a very reasonable price. Not long after this, the large plant in the corner of my kitchen had an unfortunate accident and suddenly I had the space ;-) The deal was sealed.

A couple of weeks later this turned up on the back of a truck:

The great thing was, because the PC was already setup it was just a case of plugging in, chucking some ROM's onto it and I was ready to game. Over the next few months I added more games to the MAME build and messed about with the mameWah frontend to make it look a little less basic when it started up but I couldn't do much more as the PC inside wasn't that powerful. Also, Radiant Silvergun was really choppy and as that's one of my favourite games I needed to do something to fix it.

I came across HyperSpin on Youtube and decided that I was going to build a new PC to go in the cab, one that could run Hyperspin, all my MAME games and any other emulators I wanted. I ordered some parts and waited for a delivery......

The First Post!

Ok, so it's quite late and I've got work tomorrow so I'm not going to put much in my first post. This is the first blog I've ever done so I'm not really sure what your supposed to do for your first post :-)


The idea of this blog is, now that I've finally got the arcade machine in my kitchen working just how I want, to post info and reviews on all the different retro games I'm able to play. I'll also give some info on the machine itself   and how I got it configured as that has taken a fair bit of trawling the web and may be of help to others who are trying to do the same thing.


I'll start with some info about the machine tomorrow and maybe some pics.