One of my summer projects is to build a MAME cocktail cabinet. Asha, my wife, is a Ms. Pac-Man fanatic and prefers playing on a cocktail table. Of course, she also prefers playing while eating Lupi's Pizza... She's given me the go ahead to built it - with the intentions of using it as our dining table in our eat-in kitchen! Woo-hoo!
Because I live in a condo and don't have access to good woodworking tools, I'm going to start with a cabinet kit from ArcadeDepot. I haven't decided on the wood or finish, but since this goes in our dining room, I'll probably go with oak with a red oak finish and oak veneer. This will make it look more like furniture than pure arcade geekiness. I'm also going to leave out the overlays and graphics. The final product will look something like the image on the left except it won't have the black-plastic trim one, and I'm not going to bother with a coin-door and the finish will be darker.
For the guts, I'm re-purposing my Via Eden 5000 fanless motherboard from one of my early aerial photography platforms. I'm going to use my IDE to Compact Flash adapter and try to keep the entire system under 512MB. I have an old Gateway 19" monitor and some powered speakers that'll would out the A/V. For controls, I'm going to use an Ultimarc I-Pac with two 8-way/4-way switchable joysticks and probably five buttons per side plus three other buttons for controls (a total of thirteen buttons).
The main goal is to play accurate Ms. Pac-Man but I'm also hoping to play, at a minimum, Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, and Time Pilot. I'd like to add Defender but I'm not sure how it plays on a portrait-mode screen. If Defender doesn't work well, I'll scale back the number of buttons I need.
The first part of the project is simply getting a bootable MAME on the Via Eden. There are many variables right from the start - OS, MAME version, etc.
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