MAME Cabinet

The MAME Cabinet Project began on a whim. Since I was a child I wanted to own an arcade cabinet. At age eleven my local movie theater sold two of its arcade games, Donkey Kong Jr. and Super Mario Bros. These happened to be two of my favorite games, even to this day. They were $100 each. I wanted them desperately but couldn't afford one of them. This sparked a dream in my mind that would take more than a decade to realize.

Part I: Realizing a Dream

I was given a heads up that the arcade in a neighboring town was selling a Tekken Tag Tournament cabinet. I was an avid Tekken fan, spending several hundred hours playing the first three games in the series. I contacted the arcade and spoke with the manager. He was selling the cabinet for $300. This was a conversion cabinet, meaning that it was not dedicated to the game but had been swapped out many times. The cabinet had been hardwired instead of using the industry standard JAMMA harness. This basically meant that if something came loose in the cabinet, it wouldn't be worth their time to fix. Being me, of course, I was confident that I could fix anything that could potentially go wrong with the game, even though I knew nothing about how the game was wired. I committed to buy the game.

My friend Ricky and I went to pick up the game on his pickup. We loaded it and got it home. It worked perfectly. This pleased me quite a bit. After years of wanting a home arcade game, my dream was realized.

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