I just wanted to introduce myself here. I am somewhat new to the arcade building world, although my roots are deep in gaming so I think it was always just a matter of time before I ended up somewhere like here.
A few months ago I was trying to think of something to add to my new game room, and I remembered that about 13 years ago I had played with emulation of old arcade games, and figured that would be perfect. I already had a ton of projects lined up for the spring, so I figured I would get a premade controller and either build a simple cabinet or order a premade one to get something up and running quickly. I settled on a tankstick and an xtension cabinet. From the time I started seriously working on this until I had a running game was about 3 weeks. I already had dozens of used computers lying around, so picking out a decent XP machine and grabbing a 19" 4:3 monitor was the first step. I then downloaded a bunch of stuff and figured I could just throw it all together and have a working game. Of course I was wrong.
Software took a lot longer than I expected and was somewhat frustrating given that I was biting off everything at once. And this was in the midst of another project around the house that was already taking 95% of my free time. But I worked through it and got things up and running with a pretty decent front end setup, and it was a HUGE hit. When the controller arrived I had it set up at the kitchen table and ended up playing Mortal Kombat against my daughter until midnight the first night. That weekend I played DOA++ until 3 am with my son. And after that weekend when the cabinet arrived, I had to fight them off to spend more time setting up game lists and tweaking settings.
But the cabinet and controls left me wanting. I was just not as impressed as I thought I would be. My background is heavily into computers and technology. I started out about 23 years ago installing car stereos and alarms, and moved into home theater and whole house music systems. After 8 years of that I went to work for the family business where I ended up settling into the IT manager position handling every aspect of technology and infrastructure for a rapidly growing business. I had actually started a side job building computers about 20 years ago so I already had a strong background in PC hardware, so as time went on I took on just about every role possible with our company. Networking, servers, client PC's, hardware, software, web design, and even landscape design, desktop publishing, and enough graphical arts to allow me to design all our advertising media. And just about everything I have done professionally in the past comes into play with this hobby.
And I have been gaming on computers since the Commodore Vic20 came out. I hate consoles, but love PC games. Of course like everyone else here I grew up hanging out in the arcades when I could afford it, so chalk up one more reason to take on arcades as a hobby.
I was married for about 17 years, and with a wife who spent too much money and 3 kids, money was always pretty tight. I have always been a goal oriented person though, so when I set my mind to doing something I do it, regardless of how much overtime I had to work to pay for it. But there were so many hobbies over the years that cost money, building an arcade machine was pretty low on the priority list. But one of the hobbies I worked on over the years was woodworking, and I have built a pretty extensive wood shop in my garage (which I got to keep in the divorce thankfully). I also have all my tools and knowledge from the many years of doing custom stereo and security systems. So when this project came up, I just couldn't settle on mediocre. And now that I have been divorced for a few years, I actually have some money to play with.
But with so many other projects in the works on my house, I was kind of forced to stick with my initial purchase. This brings me to two weeks ago. I had been trying to get some newer Naomi games to work on the XP machine I had running everything, and realized that the only way it would happen was with a decent 3d card, but the computer I had picked was a micro tower, and there were very few decent half height video cards available. So I had a "retired" computer at work that I had set aside to make a second home desktop for the kids (they are always fighting over the laptop), and it was a pretty decent spec'd machine, so I dusted off an older 3D card I had lying around and started putting it together. This machine had a core i7 cpu, more memory, a high performance drive, windows 7 64 bit, and was a regular micro atx case. I shoehorned the massive GTX285 graphics card into it and then threw in an SSD drive I had lying around. First attempts to make it work with Demul failed for some reason, and led me to wipe the machine and start from scratch with a clean install. And right in the middle of this my brother walked into my office and asked what I was working on, and I pointed to the computer and said I was going to upgrade the PC in the arcade. He then asked if the one I had was working, and I said yeah, but not for the newer games. He asked what I had into it and I told him about a grand and something like 50 hours of work in setup. I had shoehorned a 23" monitor into the Xtension cab, which was exactly 20.5 inches wide, the exact inside dimension of the cab, and that cost me an extra $150, so I was into it for around $890 after a few extras here and there. My brother then offered me $1500 if I could get it to work flawlessly with about 100 games and be easy to use. Suddenly I had a means to upgrade to what I should have done in the first place.
I will start a separate thread for the build. I would have started posting almost two weeks ago but it took this long to get my forum membership approved. Things are coming along nicely though even though I couldn't ask for advice on some of my choices, lol. I look forward to spending a little more time here talking about this hobby.
Dave
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