The New PC

I needed to replace the aging P4 system in my arcade cab if I wanted to run HyperSpin to the level of quality I was after and chuck some other emulators on there. I already had a spare 600W power supply that I could use so placed an order for the following bits to build the new machine:

• Intel Core i3 540 CPU (3.06GHz)
• Gigabyte H55M-UD2H Motherboard
• 4Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM (2x 2Gb)
• 500Gb Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
• Coolermaster Elite 360 Case
• Samsung DVD Drive

It all went together pretty easily, although the CPU cooler is a tight fit in that case, and the system posted first time :-)

Once I'd installed Windows I spent a bit of time overclocking it to see what I could get out of the CPU. At the moment I've got it running at 4GHz with headroom to go higher if needed, but tbh nothing I've put on there so far has come close to struggling and the system's running quite cool so I think I'll leave it for a while. The only other work I've done is to wire the button in the arcade cab, which is top right in the pic (Push to Eject Coins), to the Power On/Off header on the motherboard. So now, when the cab is sealed up, I can turn  it on and off using the old coin return button :-)

That's it for the hardware, HyperSpin and emulators are next........

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.