Building a MAME Cabinet

I discovered MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator we'll refer to as Mame), back in '99. I was working at 3Com and kind of stumbled upon it perhaps from a coworker, I fogot how. You could install this program and as long as you found the digital copies of an arcade game's ROMs (Read-Only Memory chips, we'll call roms from now on), you could load and emulate that game in Mame. I loaded a few classics like Pac Man and Mario Bros and I was hooked. Thanks to a great site called mame.dk, I was able to build a complete collection of Mame roms and play all the classics to my heart's content.

However, the controls always left something to be desired. Playing on a keyboard kinda sucks especially games like Street Fighter. While struggling to find a better way to play, one quickly finds websites dedicated to making arcade controls, websites like BYOAC (Build Your Own Arcade Controls). Then soon the idea springs up of putting your Mame computer in an actual arcade cabinet and playing it there. Thanks to the hundreds of links on the examples page no doubt.

So there I am at the dawn of the 21st century with an obsession with Mame and a desire to get/build/assemble an arcade cabinet running Mame. I dabbled with keyboard hacking and building a control panel. An easy entry point for most of us. I built the box out of a 48" shelf and some brackets and got the controls from Happ Controls. However I used Happ Ultimates for the stick and button because I thought they'd be more authentic. Unfortunately I found the buttons and stick to be less responsive than I would've liked. Competition sticks are the way to go apparently. The best buttons of the whole set that I got are the 1up and 2up buttons. They're Happ horizontal pushbuttons. On the next control panel I get, they'll all be competition or horizontal buttons. I let the stick gather dust for a long time before busting it back out again recently. It was always a pain in the ass plugging it in because it was a running a hacked PS2 keyboard. Recently I installed a iPAC and the thing works great... but the stick and buttons still kinda suck.