| I discovered MAME sometime in 1997 I think.
Right after early versions of the Windows port came out. I thought
it was the greatest thing ever. During the late 70's and 80's
I played a ton of video games. Stargate and Tron were probably
my favorites. But it was never the same as the real thing because
the controls were so crappy with the keyboard and PC joysticks.
So I sorta lost interest for a while. I kept thinking that it
would be so cool to somehow rig arcade controls to the PC to
play MAME. But I never really figured a way to do it.
Then in April of 1999 I rediscovered MAME. Things had really
progressed in the last year and a half. The latest versions
were really something. TONS more games are now supported and
many of the problems were fixed. This really got me thinking
that there has to be a way to get arcade controls working
with MAME. Then I discovered two sites that got this project
started. Arcade@Home
and Build
Your Own Arcade Controls FAQ.
After reading damn near all I could from these sites and
the examples that others had done, I knew that I had to try
to build my own cabinet. So I looked all over the 'net to
find a cabinet I could use to build my project. In mid May
of 1999 I found a Ghost 'n Goblins cabinet for sale near my
home (Chicago area). I bought the game for $150.00 plus about
$60.00 to rent a truck to get it home. After I started to
work on it I discovered that it was really a converted Defender
cabinet. COOL! I really liked defender also.... even though
it was really hard. These pages will describe how I went about
converting this old Defender game into a MAME cabinet.
|
