Timbo's Mame Cab

Welcome to my
MAME cabinet website!

No Quarters Needed!

Feb. 20, 2004 (7:15 pm)

Well it has been 5 days short of a year since I updated this site. A lot of things happened that slowed down the progress of my MAME cab. First we bought a new house and sold our old house. The problem was that we had to be out of our old house before our new house was finished so into an apartment we went and into a storage unit the mame cab went along with all our other stuff. We finally got moved into the new house around the middle of Aug. 2003. Once we got in the real work started. Never the less things started to settle down about the middle of Dec. but the holidays then kept us busy. Then the biggest change came Dec 31, 2003 at 5:47 pm our first child was born, Jessica Pree (not shown in picture). She has been a joy and Daddy is very proud. Lucky for me I got the MAME cab 98% complete before she arrived. I look forward to introducing her to MAME and playing Bubble Bobble with her. I plan another MAME project soon I have just not figured out exactly what I want to do.

Pictured above is my wifes cousin playing my MAME Cab during a Family Christmas get together Dec. 26, 2003, it was a huge hit with the younger and older kids.

Feb. 25, 2003 (1:52 pm)

I have received several e-mail's asking "How I wired up the ground wire using quick disconnects?" So I have added a picture that shows one set of my buttons. You can see the Blue Ground Wire coming in from the top then it is wired in series with all the other switches ground terminals. The Ground terminal is the top terminal on the switches as shown in this picture. All the switches ground terminals have 2 wires attached except the top center because it is the last one in the series. The wires are held to the terminal using quick disconnects bought at a local electronics store. I used uninsulated connectors and they are .250 size female connectors. This is only temporary until the cabinet is complete. At that time I will solder the wires to the terminals for a more permanent connection.

Feb. 11, 2003 (2:01 pm)

Had to move my website because the overwhelming response from www.arcadecontrols.com. The free service would not allow for the amount of hits I was receiving and kept shutting down my website for over usage.

Feb. 08, 2003 (8:35 pm)

Added my MAME cabinet website to www.arcadecontrols.com website. They have a great database of cabinets people have built. My cabinet is project 585.

Feb. 07, 2003 (5:56 pm)

Fed-Ex Ground delivered my touchpad this afternoon that
I won on E-bay. I plan on mounting it to the control panel
making it easy to control windows when I'm not running MAME.
The touchpad was plug and play, NO drivers needed.
$10 well spent I think.

Feb. 07, 2003 (10:04 am)

Well it is still cold and snowing out so I have not done any work on the cabinet lately. The wife and I have braved the cold a few times to go out in the garage and played a game or 2 of Bubble Bobble.

I have finally got around to adding a couple of pages. The Control Panel page and the Interface page are up. They as well as the whole site is a Work In Progress so things may change over time.

I have been searching E-bay for some warm weather. I can't seem to find any! I thought you could find anything on E-bay? May be I am looking in the wrong category.

Jan. 22, 2003 (1:48 pm)

With the weather getting down into the single digits for the next few days and my MAME cabinet out in the garage I thought this would be a good time to start working on my MAME Cabinet website.

How did this all start? Well for me it started back in the late 70's and early 80's. My first memories of playing arcade games was at a local arcade that was in the Northside Mall (Dothan, AL). The name of the arcade was Good Times. I spent many hours and quarters there playing such classics as Space Invaders, Asteroids, Q-bert, Qix, Stargate, and of course my favorites Galaga and Donkey Kong! There was always something about that arcade it was dark, loud, smoky and and the glow of the marquees just seem to pull you in.

Moving ahead, mid to late 90's. I got my first computer Dec '96. It was a IBM Aptiva Pentium 166mhz it was the Hottest thing on the market the week I bought it. 2 gig hard drive, 16 mb ram, 8x CD-rom,and a 28.8 modem it was Hot Sh_t! I was lucky to get it out of the box. I had no clue about computers. But with some time allot of reading and annoying allot of people that did know about computers I finally began to figure it out. Once I developed some basic computer skills I started playing games on it as most folks do. Even though the games were great I still found my self searching for the old classics. Donkey Kong being my favorite, I downloaded and tried many games that were supposed to be like the original. Never being able to find anything that measured up I finally gave up my search.

I believe it was sometime around Oct. 10, 2001 that Meagan Morrone from the show The Screen Savers introduced a program on her featured Download of the Day called MAME32. I downloaded the program and some legal roms and started to play. MAME32 version 0.36 was great, I could not believe how much fun playing the old classic games were. I have been playing and sharing them with my friends ever since.

Shortly after being introduced to MAME32 I started wanting to build a control panel for it. Not having a clue how, I started by doing a Google search on arcade parts and found several places that sold replacement parts for arcade games. Great I thought I'm in business. After doing just a little more research I realized that making a interface for the joysticks and the buttons would be a little more than I was wanting to take on so I dropped the whole idea.

Fast Forwarding to November 2002. Something re-sparked my interest in News Groups and made me do a MAME search on Googles News Group area. What I found was what started this project. The newsgroup alt.games.mame was full of postings on MAME and MAME Cabinets. I could not believe that people were building full size upright cabinets that were powered by MAME. After lurking in the alt.games.mame for a while I started researching MAME Cabinets and found a large number of websites with large amounts of information on building your own full size arcade cabinet powered by MAME.

Now that I had all this information it was time to get started. I picked out a design, bought a sheet of 3/8 inch plywood and started cutting out my first template. Well the template turned out good but I was not happy with the style, so back to the drawing board. Finally on Dec 05, 2002 I picked another design and went to Menards (Hardware store) and bought 2 sheets of 3/4 inch MDF boards , brought them home and started cutting. The design I finally decided to go with was based on LuSid's design. I would say it is one of the most copied designs being used today and I am very happy with the way it is turning out. As of right now my cabinet is basically down to cosmetic work. I have to paint it, do some artwork design for the side and the marquee. I also need to figure out what to do about a control panel overlay, any suggestions?

Now you know the whole story!

The webpage as well as the cabinet is a Work In Progress (WIP) so I will add to the page as updates are made.