Arcade Project 07: MAME 01 Upright

Today we're going to look at parts for a MAME Cabinet.

Now, there are people that will sell you fully functioning, built and ready to go MAME machines with games installed, controllers wired, authentic CRT monitors and custom graphics.  These machines are also going to cost you $2500+ depending on the options you tack on.  I've looked at a lot of the top names in the MAME machine business and if you want a "no hassle, just work" solution, then this is your best bet.  X-Arcade makes some nice looking, fairly blingy cabinets, but if you're planning on playing fighting games vigorously on them, then you might want to read up on their controls.  Dream Arcades get a lot of press.  They aren't the best looking, but they are built solid, and you'll be able to get pro-level controls installed in them easily.  There are better options for DIY people.  I'm fairly adept at doing electronic.  I can even computer.

Recroommasters is a website I've had bookmarked for years.  They are not a MAME machine builder, they are a cabinet supplier.  They will create and ship you an empty shell of a cabinet that is set up and ready for installing a MAME set up inside it.  There is no computer, there is no speakers, or even controls, it is a shell.  It is also only $199 to $599 depending on what you want to get.  They have these shelf top cabinets made to sit on a bar table.  They have these flat topped arcade cabinets designed for you to just sit a monitor on top of it.  The best thing about them, they have an entire series set up for dropping in X-Arcade controls.  For $299 you get a stand up cabinet with the classic enclosed monitor look, routed to accept a Dual-tank Stick from X-Arcade, and ready to accept a 22 inch LCD monitor.

Now let's look at controls.  There are a lot of people out there making controllers.  X-Arcade is someone that is doing them completely affordable, and completely versatile.  These things plug into PS2's, PS3, Windows PC's, Macs, whatever you have, they'll be usable.  Also they are completely contained inside themselves, so you can move them around, they are not stuck inside your arcade cabinet.  For $100 you get controls for 2 people.  People poop on X-Arcade for them not using Japanese arcade parts meant to take abuse from Street Fighter players 24/7.  I think they are built great for all around gaming.  Besides, I have other plans for fighting games...

Now let's look at the computer to go inside it.  You do not need a powerful computer to play MAME enabled games.  Games that MAME is able to accurately emulate were generally in the arcades before 2002.  For the most part we're looking at 4-15 mghz computers being emulated by MAME.  There is no reason to get a top of the line computer for use in a MAME machine, and many "custom" MAME builders know this... they have a stockpile of cheap Pentium 3 computers bought for $20-30 that they can stick inside their machines and still charge you 2-3,000 bucks.  We do not quite want to go that ancient.  Do yourself a favor, go to Newegg.com and buy a refurbished computer with Windows 7 and an Intel processor.  So let's allocate $250 for the inside computer.  If you do as I say, you'll get a keyboard and mouse along with it.

When it comes to monitors, you have a lot of cheaper options.  The 22 inch screen size is falling out of vogue for PC gamers, so there is a glut of sub-$100, brand new monitors.  I am a stickler for great color.  The panel known as IPS has only become less than high end in the past couple of years.  This means that if you get an IPS panel monitor you can be safely assured you will be getting lower latency, great color, and good features for your buck.  TN panels are faster for things like FPS's, but for our arcades, I think IPS is fine.  For $150 you can get a great monitor with 2-3 HDMI ports so you can hook up more than just the MAME machine if you want(like hooking up your PS3).  Rounding out the arcade computer, get yourself a 2.1 speaker set up with subwoofer for about $50.  I like Logitech for quality IN THAT PRICE range.

Now we go to graphics.  You have a few options here.  There are permanent stickers, which tend to look better in the long term... as long as you get them applied correctly the first time.  I for one, get all finicky about wanting to change things when I get tired of them.  The option for that is reusable vinyl stickers.  They have a less "custom paint" looking style to them, but you can re-apply them if you don't get it right the first time.  You can save old designs to bring back later.  There are several services for this kind of thing, but Recroommasters provides this service and a few more graphic options as well.  I'll allocate $150 for graphics.

So, there's our Upright MAME arcade.  I will not list all the games you can do with it for obvious reasons, but you can find legit and legal MAME collections to use for very cheap.  Not counting the games, we have about $1000 for the whole arcade.  Compared to spending $700-$3000 for each individual game, this MAME machine is a steal.  It is also a space saver for a small arcade like the one we're planning.

Arcade Project 06: Accessorize

Accessory Decisions

Popcorn gives us a few options.  Chances are I am going to own an air-popper for my personal use, but having popcorn is not "enough".  We're talking about experiences here.  Also, have you ever smelled popcorn from an air popper?  Not much smell(or taste) to the stuff when you prepare it that way.  At a movie theater they have the large heated bowl with a stirring mechanism so you can add butter or oil of your choice.  I know how to operate them because of past-work experiences, so I want something that works like that.  BUT.  AGAIN.  Experiences, not full on replication.  I do not want to have to deal with giant garbage bags of popcorn that is uneaten.  So a 2-4 oz bowl is good enough for me.  I also do not want one of those wheel and crate looking things.  Those are nice if you want the movie lobby experience from the 50's, that's not our goal.  A nice desktop popcorn machine, hand made in the USA for about $130 will do it.

Wow, Sticker Machines are freakin' expensive.  I guess they are some real money makers?  Anyway, it looks like getting one from the same vendor as my gumball machines is going to be the least expensive.  Fun Fact: a 2 column sticker machine costs almost the same as 4 gumball machines with a stand.  My nephews all love temporary tattoos and I like prism/metallic stickers, so there we go... $280 bucks.  I'm not getting this one made for free use though, I plan on having good stickers, and I knew my nephews would run the machine dry of tattoos on the first day if they weren't limited.  

The Jukeboxes of my past were either the Waffle House standards or the super flashy, mirror finish, spinning CD jukeboxes of the 1990's.  They were huge, and frankly they could now all fit on my phone with very little effort or expense.  But we're not about practicality here, we're about experiences.  Thing is, I don't have many strong jukebox experiences, just like I don't care for pool.  So while fans of arcades from the 80's will hate my kind of arcade room, I'm ok with it.  Most "desktop" jukeboxes want to emulate the Happy Days lookin' jukeboxes of the 50's and 60's.  These things are expensive, and they are expenses I'm not going to incur.  Sorry Jukebox fans, no Jukebox in my arcade.

Upholstered booth seating is actually pretty affordable compared to trying to get nice non-restaurant style seating for a room.  For under $300 you can typically get 2 tone, foam and SPRING cushioned custom covered booth seats.  The room is so small, I see no reason to get 2 of them, one booth and a table will work fine.  I put springs in all caps because those are the higher quality ones.  There are some people out there that sell non-spring ones for a mark up because they use "space foam" and stuff like that, but don't let that fool you, that is the lower end stuff at a reputable maker.  If you can get a good deal on the color and covering you want, and get spring seating for under $300, then you should.  I'm looking to get a wood grain top laminate with red trim and chrome accents, done long enough for booth use, custom created to my order for $132 with free shipping.  You can save money buying used, but why not try and get exactly what you want made when its not a huge mark up?

 $140 extra bucks for a double set of  matching ottoman style stools rounds out the seating.  These are also storage, and easily moved around.  You can put them on the other side of the booth table for additional seating, but they also serve dual purpose as usage in a sit down arcade set up.  When not in use, they can tuck under the booth table so they are out of the way.  They will be useful for holding extra gaming controllers and for hiding some wires that are only occasionally used.


Last but not least, any Arcade needs a score board.  They can be used for high scores, yes, but they can also be used for setting up tournaments, or schedules or a number of things(maybe what needs to be restocked in the food area).  So I looked at GOOD dry erase boards and came across a porcelain based, magnetic dry erase board that was 3 foot by 6 foot.  I can live with that, and the porcelain means that it will less likely look like shit after years of use.  It is $130.

Arcade Project 05: Ball Design

Let's look at making some decisions on our accessories.

Starting with the Gumball machine.  What you see there is the new "standard" of these kinds of things.  Its easy to stash a lot of those in a truck, there's not a lot of maintenance, and they're cheaper all around.  They also did not exist much in my childhood, and on top of that they are not very versatile.  If one of those were to break(which happens), then the other two are sitting by an ugly unused one with an "out of order" sign on it.  I much prefer the classic, and to be honest you only spend another hundred or so, and then you can do things like mix and match colors and designs.

Looking at manufacturers, I think I want to get a mix of 2 styles, but in the same decor.  I want two of the "1 inch" dispenser types that let you use gumballs and bulk candy like runts.  In fact, that's probably the two I will have.  Everywhere I went had the "Runts" candies inside, and for good reason; they last forever.  They are also very hard and will not tend to break into pieces as much as sweet tarts and the like.  Some people like super sour gumballs, but not me, I want the regular looking ones, though I may get tropical flavors.

That leaves me 2 machines that I will order to use the 2 inch "shells" for toys.  I loved collecting a couple of things in my childhood.  I remember the little plastic men you could get in the machines that you would put in water and they'd expand and get bigger.  I remember the sticky hands that you could slap and sling against walls, and the ones filled with goop and slime.  For some reason, despite me not ever liking Football all that much, I collected the football helmets.  I am not sure what I'd have(I know some of you are screamin' HOMIES!), but for sure two of the machines would be for the shell toys.



Now we talk cost.

There are arguments for going "used" with this sort of thing.  If I was going to be saving 1/2 price or more, then I would consider it.  One look at Ebay and people are looking more to unload something they've found in a very very dirty place.  Getting them new means its about $340 for 4 machines, but you get them made custom.  I can get the 2 configured for gumball/bulk, 2 configured for acorn shells, and all set up for "free spin" meaning I will not need to have a handful of quarters around for everyone.  If you want that "token" experience, you can even have them made to use game tokens.  For such a small game room, I do not think I'll be doing the token thing for any of the games, so it doesn't make sense for the snack machines either.  Also with new, you can have them painted in several different colors to match your room decor.  I'm going with Red.

Gaming Memories 02: Adventures of Link

Gaming Memories 02: Adventures of Link

VIP Video was the kind of small business rental place that I hear so many people talk about when giving game memories.  It was the local "we're cheaper than Blockbuster" store and was the first place I was ever able to rent a game from.  When we were handed the membership card, the first thing I did was make a line to the video game section and look at what they had.  In the early days, I was restricted to what I got on Christmas, and what my cousins owned.  So getting to see the "new" games on the wall was really exciting.  The first to catch my eye was:

I was almost as happy as I had ever been when I saw that.  Legend of Zelda was a game I did not yet own, but I knew plenty of people that did.  I was always restricted to maybe an hour of playing it because I only got to play it when I visited relatives.  Now here was part 2, something I did not know even existed, and for all I knew none of these people with Zelda 1 did either.  There was no deliberation, I took it home.

When I got home... holy crap what was this?  The game was like a map without monsters... wait, so you go into the thing and suddenly we're... Mario style?  No, more like NES Rambo style.  Well maybe it is still good.  I was hopeful for my first rental, so I tried.  Wow.  Wow.  This game was bad.  This game was so bad, I started inspecting things like the cartridge.  Sure it was gold, but I think it was an off color gold, not exactly like Zelda was, right?

I came to the conclusion that the game was a bootleg.  Not a true sequel by the people that made the original  I know it is hard today to understand how I could think that, but back in the late 80's and early 90's, we could still get the shady junk from the far east.  You can now go and download roms of things like Sonic the Hedgehog, hacked into another game and sold as a real Sonic game for the NES.  They come on real cartridges.  There was also the Tengen games that were not licensed to be sold on the NES and were real sketchy games as well.  So that's what I concluded, must be a bootleg.

It wasn't.  But thankfully my next run in with Zelda, the SNES "Link to the Past" was exactly what I expected in a Zelda sequel.

Arcade Project 03: Roomifications

With this set up, I want to accurately estimate how much it would cost to outfit a room as an arcade.  So first I have to settle on the room size.  There are several room standards around today, and I did a little research to try and get an idea for them.  In most rented apartments, condos and town homes, the average size of a bedroom is 10'x10'.  I am not a big fan of living around a lot of people like that, high density living I guess you'd call it.  Well in the suburbs, you get a little bit more space with 10'x12' rooms.  Now this stays the size for quite a wide range of homes.  When the house gets larger, you simply get extra spaces in the home for gathering together, and the emphasis on a "room" holding all the entertainment kind of goes away.

I have decided that a 10'x12' room will be what I choose to base this project on.

The Dark Room

Now that we have a room, I need to come up with a color scheme to match everything with.  The classic is to go with blacks, dark blues, purples and some neon.  Some people really like that, and that's the way that the Penny Arcade artist, Mike Krahulik, went for his game room.  This is what the arcades looked like in the 1990's.  Presumably it saved on the cost of lighting to be able to have everything dark, and it made the older arcades with the fading televisions look decent enough.  As I've said before, I actually do not have a big picture of "this is what an arcade should LOOK like" I more know how I want it to feel and the memories for it to bring back.  The cool thing is that they make glow in the dark and UV reactive carpets for this style.  What I do not like is that it is very dark, even when the lights are on.  The arcade room I'm designing is not something for someone's basement, or for a room in a detached garage, it is part of the home.

The Light

Looking at home theaters, there is another set of colors that I like; the red and gold scheme.  This scheme looks good in light as well as when its dark.  The gold is a little gaudy though, and I've never big a fan of lots of red in a room, it causes me to be agitated.  If we darken the red to be closer to maroon, and tone down the gold, maybe use a light wood instead, and we start getting into something that looks decent among other rooms.  Another thing to take into consideration is all the accessories for the room.  Gumball machines, sticker dispensers, popcorn machines, all of these come in red, and so matching that would be easy as well.

So I found a pretty easy to edit empty room that somewhat looked like the right size and I paintshopped it up to try these out.

I have to admit that even though I've decided not to go this way... this is tempting.  I would love to make a star filled ceiling and some galaxy artwork around the wall instead of gaming artwork.  Still, you can see it is REALLY dark there.

This one has the addition of the accessories listed at the bottom in the colors you can get them.  The carpet is just... an approximation.  I have some ideas on the carpet I'd like to have and I'm not happy with the carpet i used here, but still, its there for visual estimation.  The room was still a little too red for me and the room itself looked a little too normal.  So I tried again.

This is looking much better IMO.  The wood trim breaks up the room, and the addition of white means I do not have to have an "accent" white wall to break up all the red.  I like this, and as far as things go, I think this may end up how the room looks.  I have an "over the top" concept I want to do based on  a home theater picture I found.... when I do that, I"ll add it into this post, but I think this room is the way I'm going to go.

Gaming Memories 01: Top Gun

Gaming Memories 01

Gaming Memories is probably going to be all over the place in size and scope.  Its going to be a series where I just chose a game and talk about a memory associated with it.  Sometimes it'll be "the cover was so bad, I never rented it" and sometimes it might be a huge story.

Top Gun

I'm not sure if I'm one of the last generation to remember that younger kids got black and white televisions before they could have a color TV or not.  My cousin was one such person that had a tiny black and white TV aside in their living room so that he could play without taking up the main television.  He had several Nintendo games that I had played in other homes, but the one game he had that no one else did for a while was Top Gun.  Now, if you go back today and play Top Gun you're going to be treated to a neon colored user interface, with greens and oranges showing up everywhere.  The explosions are going to be red and yellow, the ocean is going to be a bright blue.  The game is actually pretty high contrast in design.  I did not get to see any of that for many years.

They say that dreaming in black and white is a phenomena associated with people that grew up with black and white television, and that while it was thought of as common place a couple of decades ago, no one generally dreams in black and white today.  You get a lot of references to dreaming in black and white in old 80's sitcoms, which makes sense as in their childhoods they all had black and white.  Well, when I dream of playing Top Gun, I dream about it in black and white.  The rest of the world is colorful, yes, but it is always the black and white version of Top Gun I played as a kid that pops up in my dreams.

Arcade Project 04: Extra Sensory

Extra Sensory Memories

Memories are not just visual, I find that many of my strongest memory triggering events focus on smell and taste.  These will shape my "food" section that I think is a must for any arcade.  While all the true arcades I saw at the mall were near the food court, the ones in my mind had their own snack bars.  A snack bar is a must for me because food is nostalgia.

The skating rink is one of my most early memories.  I could not skate, but I remember going there with my sisters and cousins a few times.  This was probably around 3-4 years old?  Somewhere around there.  It was so long ago that I can not remember the games AT ALL.  But I do remember other things.  There was an Alvin and the Chipmunks cardboard cut out at the front that I always wanted to play in because it looked like a tree house.  The other thing I remember is Bugles.  Yes, the salty corn snack Bugles.  It is a very powerful taste to memory association for that time period.  EVERY time I eat or smell Bugles, it makes me 3 years old again.  Very little things in my life are as strong a send back as that.  So Bugles is a must.  Vending machines are super costly brand new, yet pretty damn cheap used, so I will probably look to Ebay for that.  I have some ideas on how to manage a vending machine also, that'll be in the cost evaluation posts later.

My most frequented "arcades" were actually little sections in other stores.  Walmart is where I got most my arcade experience, but it was set up at the front of the place, so aside from pressure sensitive doors, nothing much about it to remember.  But then there was Pizza.  Pizza Hut was a place that had 2 or 3 arcades and I got to play a game every time we came to pick up our pizza.  The games... weren't really all that great.  There are nice shiny stickers... so that's something I need to put down on the ideas list.  Later it was CiCi's Pizza, the one that recently went out of business, where I got my arcade gaming on after the old Walmart moved.  Whoever ran it was a big Mortal Kombat fan because they got the latest version of the game as soon as it was out.  The pizza was secondary, but the smell was always there.  Pizza and Rootbeer.  Its weird for me to have pizza without having rootbeer with it now.  A soda machine might be right out of budget, but one of those turn style pizza bakers may not be.

Lastly in this section we have popcorn.

It was the old movie theater from my childhood that makes me think of popcorn when I think of games.  That theater always had movies a year after they were released, the prints were in horrible condition, and their games were just as bad and old.  But old beat up arcades still held great games; I played the hell out of Pole Position, Punch-out, and even played Street Fighter 1.  So a popcorn machine is a must... I just have to decide weather Air-popped with no oil will cut it or not.  My HUGE HUGE problem... that place used a coconut oil system for their popcorn.  Now the type of oil largely dictates what the popcorn smells like and i bet the one from your childhood used coconut oil.  When it gets cold, your coconut oil solidifies.  So every time I'd want to make a batch for memories sake... I'd have to make sure the oil is warmed before turning the machine on.  I do not know if any other kind of popcorn would trigger my memories as much, as the vegitable based oils will bring up my teenage movie theater job memories instead.

Bugles, Pizza, Rootbeer, Popcorn, prioritized in that order.  There are some super cheap additional things I may get for atmosphere and because they're cheap.  I think I may end up just keeping the soda in the fridge, and cooking the pizza in the oven, but making sure I have a way to present it in the room.