MAME Arcade Cabinet (mostly) Assembled and Playable!

I’ve made a lot of progress recently, and can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

After painting it, I reassembled it. I couldn’t bring myself to put the 25" tube tv back in, so instead I used a 22" LCD I had laying around. I’m more than happy with that decision.

After numerous weeks’ worth of hard drive/raid/motherboard issues, I performed a midnight heart transplant and got everything working just in time for a party we were having.

It was a hit. I was really interested to watch how our friends, parents, and kids interacted with it. It needs to be iPad-simple to use. After watching for some time, it was clear that it’s not there yet. I had software tweaks to make (more on that in my next post), and interface changes to make as well.

The biggest pain point was confusion on how to launch a game (pressing Player 1) and exit a game (pressing Player 1 and Player 2 at the same time). To remedy this, I added a dedicated Start/Stop button at the top left of the control panel. I added two buttons next to the 4-way joystick for use in older games like Galaga, Super Mario Bros., etc.