Homecoming

Would you believe, our cat came home Sunday night, after a week and a half on the lam?! I randomly looked out the kitchen window, and there he was in the yard. Overall, he's skin and Bilbones (he pretty much started out that way though), but in good spirits and happy to be home. His sister, on the other hand, is having a freak-out Pet Sematary/Changeling reaction to his return. Hopefully she's wrong about that.

And another beast arrived this week - the arcade machine! It looks MARVELOUS, the red trim is great, and Shawn did a flat-out amazing job on the control panel and wiring.


It's going to need a lot of tweaking - the xxxx-in-1 JAMMA board is, we've discovered, FAR from plug-and-play. In many ways it would have been easier to put a MAME-ulating computer into the cabinet, but I'm still happy with the JAMMA setup. Like with MAME, we're going to have to configure the controls for some of the more complicated and multiplayer fighting games, but classic games like Wonderboy and 2-player ones like Dungeons & Dragons seem to work just fine. We've got some learning to do, though, about dipswitch settings, and updating the hard drive so it will play trackball games properly.



It turned out that the marquee we liked best for it was not the one we originally considered. I did some mock-ups, and the simplicity and red tones of this version won.


In person, The Beast is also much more badass than I expected, and now that I've seen it, I think I will hold off on the side art. I just have this feeling that it would be displeased with cartoony flanks. Besides, I'm going to need that bit of cash to properly 80s-ify The Beast's room. It will need a Last Starfighter poster, and some He-man action figures, at the very least.

In other news, I noticed that a remake of Clash of the Titans is in the works. By the gods! I absolutely loved the original, so this is one of those dangerous yet exciting propositions.

Home Arcade Project

I've had my heart set on my very own Ms. Pac-Man table-style arcade machine for...ever. In the interest of variety, though, I realize it'd probably be best to build one of those MAME cabinets that are all the rage these days. I mentioned this dream of mine to my friend Robert, who said, "I know just who you should talk to about that!" and referred me to Shawn, world record holder in Zoo Keeper, and builder of custom arcade machines. As a hobby. You know, when he's bored. :)

JAMMA vs. MAME
Now at first, the plan was to use our old PC and do the MAME cabinet thing. Shawn suggested an alternative, using a JAMMA board designed for exactly this purpose. If you haven't heard of these (I hadn't), JAMMA stands for Japan Arcade Machine Manufacturers' Association, and it's a standardization applied to most arcade games made after 1985 (however, MANY older classic arcade games like Ms. Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Frogger are included on the multi-game JAMMA boards). The board doesn't have as many games as MAME of course (currently 1069 + 139), but it may be preferable to sacrificing your computer to the cause, it's designed to go in an arcade cabinet (and therefore, I assume, easier to install), and more titles continue to be added via upgradeable hard drive. Also, though some of the titles in the list are duplicates, it includes almost every game I could want. Plus there's a whole collector aspect of seeking out the individual PCB boards for any particular game you might fancy that's not already on the list (in my case, Primal Rage, for example). You can swap in any JAMMA PCB board you want once you have the setup.

Choose Your Own Cabinet
So what will house this savage beating heart of 1200 games? In our case, because we wanted 4-player capability, we wound up going with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet, which has a 25" monitor (as opposed t the 19" CRT we would have put in if we went the MAME route). Gauntlet was definitely in the running, but it is a HUGE machine, and the monitor is set at a very low angle. I didn't think we'd want to play all games that way. I'm also fond of the Turtles, Rafael in particular. Watched the old cartoon, owned the Krang action figure, and yes, left the theater after seeing the first film singing the theme song with my brother and sister.

One could also make a cabinet from scratch, there are lots of schematics available online for that. In many cases, this will cost you about the same as an existing cabinet, but allows more customization options if you have something elaborate in mind.

Control Yourself!
Probably the most complex choice on a custom arcade machine project is the control panel. My husband and I favor different gaming genres - fighting games vs. straight up classics - and those styles require radically different control setups. Then there's the fact that you'll be playing hundreds of different games on this one machine, and it becomes quickly evident that you'll be needing a number of controls.

It took a LOT of thought and discussion, but currently the plan is to have 4 8-way joystick stations, the front two of which will have a six-button setup common to games like Street Fighter. The side two stations will have 3 (scratch that...4) buttons each, because our latest realization was that games like Dungeons & Dragons require 4 buttons, and above all, THOSE are the games we're going to want to play with the kids when they are old enough. It also turns out that 8-way joysticks are really not so good for classic games like pac-man. You need a 4-way joystick for that. And a trackball - don't leave Centipede out in the cold! And that trackball and 4-way are going to need fire and jump buttons of their own and...voila...5th gamer station.

And that's not even covering all the bases. Steering wheel games? Spinner games? Video pinball games? Shooting games? It's fairly impractical to have it ALL, so you have to prioritize what's important to you. The nice thing is, it's not a completely irreversible decision; it is possible to add some of these options later if you decide you just CAN'T go on without A.P.B. (d'oh...you'll need a gas pedal too!)

Next I'll dive into options for pimping the outside of the cabinet. That's a whole new can of worms!

Home Arcade Project, Part 2