MAME?!?

Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

OK, here's the skinny! All arcade video games are basically the same...monitor, controls, game board. Certain people have hacked the game boards and got the actual computer code for several of the games. Then someone else created software called MAME, which emulates, or acts like the video arcade electronics. So these games, called roms can be played in this emulator, and presto, the rest is history. There are over 4,000 different roms available and now several different emulators. The only catch is that finding the roms is a pain. Since these games have copyrights, actually disrupting them will probably get you in trouble!

Engineering

Lots of time and planning was spent on this step. Before I spent any money I did hours and hours of research for all of this @ arcadecontrols.com in the examples section. There are tons of different ways to do each part of this project. I figured that building a cabinet is a neat ideal, but I am not the carpenter type of person and it would have taken forever with lots of mistakes to get the cabinet to even stand up I'm sure. So I just searched until I found a cabinet that was big enough for me to work with.