| I called Brad a couple of weeks later
and said, “I have Mame ready, how are you doing on the
cabinet design?” Brad said, “Cabinet design? Are
we doing this?” I thought we had already decided we were,
Brad wasn’t so sure but agreed to do it. Soon after, Brad
and I needed to figure out our cabinet designs. We went to my
basement and started taking measurements of all of the machines,
control panel height, marquee height, width, distance between
buttons from center, etc. We decided to go to a local arcade
and take measurements from new machines. The local Putt Putt
was the last arcade in town and had a few games. With a tape
measure in hand, we went in and took the measurements. After
we confirmed some standards we headed back to the car. I noticed
a dead arcade machine by the dumpster 70 yards away. We snuck
over and it was a complete, except for the monitor, Atari Vindicators.
I grabbed the board set, Brad grabbed the coin door. We are
not normally dumpster divers but had had a good laugh about
it.
I went back to working on the software and Brad noodled the
design. I looked at every Mame front-end available and could
only find one I was satisfied with, MAMEWAH. It had a majority
of the basic functions I wanted and allowed me to customize
it with my own graphics and layout. I spent a week or so playing
with it and had something I liked. I closely followed the
Mame forums and noticed a couple of new version had come out
since I had created my own custom version. I decided to upgrade
which meant changing the code again and recompiling everything.
I was pretty much ready to go, Brad was still noodling.
The first big cabinet hurdle was the control panel. We had
to decide what controls we wanted and how we wanted to arrange
them. I wanted the capability for two players, trackball,
a four way joystick (Pac Man, Galaga, etc.) and I had to have
a Tempest spinner. Brad said, “What’s Tempest?”
I’m 39 now and Brad is 31 so, yeah… Brad wanted
the ability to have 4 players at once. There was a specific
game he played in school that he wanted on the Mame box (I
can’t remember which one.) Since we had different needs,
we designed 2 panels. I created a list of hardware I needed
from Happ Controls:
8 way ultimate joysticks (which stink btw) qty 2
4 way joystick
Golden Tee 3” trackball
22 different colored buttons and switches
Oscar Controls Tempest spinner
Ultimarc keyboard interface
Ultimarc mouse interface
There goes $500. Oops, I guess we didn’t consider that
controls would be so much.
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