MAME Cabinet

There have been a lot of changes to my MAME Cabinet over the years, I have a legacy (flash) page on its original build located HERE.

Currently my cabinet is configured as follows:

• Pentium 4 – 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, 40GB HD, WIFI and Wired NIC’s for remote management (file/share & VNC).
• Windows XP stripped to bare bones with Custom MAME boot splash.
• Cabinet power button wired to ATX power switch of PC. Monitor, Speakers, and Marquee lights are switched on/off via 12V controlled relay switched by PC’s PSU.
• Controls are run via an I-PAC USB HID encoder – Control panels (with encoder) can be interchanged with 2 simple plugs, 1 USB plug, and one DB9 plug to coin doors and fixed-cabinet side/front buttons.
• When control panel was rewired from the old MK64 PS/2 encoder to a new I-PAC USB encoder, I took the opportunity to sand down and paint the control panel with 3 coats of black, and then applied 6 coats of clear over that, should hold up a good long time!
• $0.25 Coin mechs with key-lock switched free-play option (free-play coin-up by pressing coin-reject button).
• Monitor is a 1990 vintage 21″ Hitachi CRT which will sync up to 1600×1200@70hz, so entirely overkill for MAME.
• Speakers are stock from cabinet, hooked up to an amplifier gutted from a pair of blown computer speakers, sounds pretty dang good!
• Marquee was inkjet printed in about 2002ish and carefully taped together, it was originally 12volt incandescent backlit with cabinets original backlight, but bulbs didn’t last that long and I have since switched to a 120volt florescent tube fixture.
• In the almost 25+ years since I built this, I have still yet to get a monitor bezel and glass, I really should get on that!