Question on best setup for retro gaming on an arcade cabinet

[Sartis]

So I wanted to get feedback regarding the best way to go in setting up an arcade cabinet for retro gaming.

The two options seem to be:

    1. Setup it up yourself by configuring a front end of choice, etc

    2. I have read about these hyperdrives that you can purchase that are pre configured with every system out there, ledblinky configured, light guns etc.

I wanted to get peoples thoughts on what way they went and why?

The pros to option 1 are:

    You understand your setup because you set it up.

    Install systems/games/emulators you want to people, sometimes less is more

    Game more because system being up and lower maintenance

The cons are:

A lot of work configuring everything.

Pros for option 2:

    Set up should be fast

    Lots of programs preconfigured

Cons for 2:

    More than likely a maintenance nightmare

    Updates through ftp can be slow

    You may not understand the way the drive is setup

    May only play 5% of the games/systems on the drive

I’m a techie so configuring my own does not scare me off and I’m leaning in that direction.

I just want to hear other peoples opinions. I know there are more pro/cons for both.

Looking forward to hearing the input.

[DoghouseReilly]

You have the pros and cons well-defined. It's just a matter of the weight you assign to each pro/con point for yourself. For me, it's not even a contest - customized all the way. Yes, I put a lot of time into setting things up for myself, but I wouldn't call it "work" - I liked exploring new games for a customized game list, I liked creating my own front end, etc...

[gildahl]

Honestly, 50% of the enjoyment of my arcade machine is playing it, and the other 50% is futzing with it.  I'm always tweaking and adding things, and to a large extent that's the "hobby" part of it, and playing the games is the "reward" part of it.  Think of it like model trains.  Do you do model trains just to run the trains or to build the layout.  It's doing both I think most enjoy.  Now yeah, if I literally just wanted a machine in the den for the kids to play with or for a bit of nostalgia once in a while, go the pre-built route, but if you're a techie, I think you'll get a lot more milage and enjoyment going your own way.

[abispac]

If you love to build, then finding everything by yourself is fun. If you just want to build a cab, or heck even buy one premade, then getting a hyperdrive or whatever could be an option. Allthough most seller of that kind, they just want to make a quick buck and wont offer help when you need one, so you ll have to figure things up by yourself.

[mixlplex]

As someone who is just getting into this hobby and chose Route 2 (get a preconfigured package) I'll give you  my take/experience:

The preconfigured systems that I've seen are designed for controllers, not arcade cabinets. Sure there's 1000+ games, but not everything is going to work with a typical arcade cabinet (joysticks and buttons). Rather than going for a hard drive, I downloaded about a dozen different builds (not sure I can say what or from where in the forums) and after checking out various configs I settled on one that best met my criteria:

• Had a mix of arcade games and consoles (more on that later)
• Had a shut down option so I could physically turn off the box via the control panel (since the PC is going to be inside the arcade cabinet, the PC is configured to turn on after power loss, so until I get around to wiring the power switch to the outside of the cabinet I can just plug the cabinet into the wall outlet and it'll all turn on and work - note: I found that my controls hooked up to my iPac controller won't wake up the computer from sleep so that's not a viable option, it has to be shutdown.)
• Had various themes I could choose from (I've generally settled on a marquee wheel since it seems to be the most responsive when scrolling through games, my PC isn't that powerful)
• Shows the cabinet of the game (though I think I'm going to move away from this if I can figure out a good way to display the game controls, I'm currently considering modifying, so the controls match my button layout, what others have done to have the controls show up in the Marquee next to the name)

I then started looking harder at the games. I had to prune a fair number of games out of the system since they didn't match my setup. This meant getting a list of the games and visiting places like the Arcade Museum (I started here, but found they don't handle console games), and ArcadeItalia (great for details on arcade games, but doesn't really do console games, oh, one of the great things about ArcadeItalia is you can search for the filename of a ROM and it gives you the info on that game, you don't have to write down the full name of the game like you do with Arcade Museum or LaunchBox), and LaunchBox (gamesdb.launchbox-app, has console games, as well as arcade games but doesn't list emulation status or controls) to figure out what types of controls the games used and eliminate any that didn't meet what my cab has (i.e. no steering wheel, no pedals, no flight stick, one joystick for each player so no twin stick games). Then prune out any games that were incomplete or preliminary. (I ended up using python to grab the pages and regex to get the contents into a usable excel file that I could use for filtering my games. I'm sure someone on here will tell me of a much easier way to do this, but I've just started up with this hobby and haven't read a whole lot. I found the MAME XML file too unwieldy to work with since it is massive.) Finally prune the list down to games that have high user/community rankings (but keeping personal favorites in, such as Legend of Kage, even if they didn't score well with other people). Realistically I'm never going to play 1000+ games, but I'm probably also not going to play 500 games, so cut out the chaff.

Then on to editing the configs so the controls matched my control panel instead of controllers. (For example, out of the box my front-end was configured to use Q to quit the emulator and the front end. I have Q mapped to one of the buttons for the second player so I changed the configs to use ESC to quit the games and emulator. I also have a spinner so I had to change the configs to use that with Mouse +/- X.) I found there's like 6 different default configs that I had to edit so things didn't get over written when themes changed or when the front end launched MAME again.

This is when I realized that consoles have a LOT of buttons on the controllers. In my arcade cabinet I've got 8 buttons plus a joystick for each player (not including a buttons for coins, player 1 or 2 start, pause, etc.) This means I've got four consoles that I can use on my cabinet: Atari 2600 (which my 'off the shelf' package doesn't include games for), Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sega Genesis. That's it.

All that said, I think it's easier to edit than it is to create. I had toyed with building my own and decided against it for a couple of reasons:

• Finding the ROMs (not too hard, but there's still searching involved)
• Finding the artwork (marquee, still images, and videos) that goes along with the ROMs
• Doing all the design work so it looks slick (I tested RetroArch and Lakka early on and decided against them - I wanted a fancier looking interface).
• I don't have to worry about trying to figure out how to get the various emulators to play nicely with the front end (that said it turns out that MAME handles all of the consoles that my control panel can handle; however, even so the 'off the shelf' package uses a couple of different versions of MAME for different games, something that probably would have had me banging my head against a wall.)

Regarding the ROMs, I think I know what games I'd like to play; however, I have no idea what my friends (or my kids friends) would want to play, so going with a list highly (community) ranked games seems to be a good way to go. The 'off the shelf' solutions do that for you. (Though there's also some not so great games included so they can boast "1000+ games!".)

I'm still doing some design work (even though I'm not a designer) since I want some categories/collections that don't exist in the 'off the self' package, namely 2-player co-op and 2-player versus (when friends come over I don't want to have to sift through which games are essentially solo play, with each player taking turns at the controls).

You raised a concern about 'may not understand how the drive is set up' or 'maintenance'. Most of the builds I found give you instructions (i.e. The drive letter must be M:, here's how to change your drive letter.), but some don't really care about the drive letter it just uses relative paths. You do have to install various standard software packages (such as Visual C++, and a .Net Framework) but it was pretty straight forward and the packages I found had those bundled with them. This is also going in a cab that won't be connected to the internet (so Windows updates don't mess things up). I know this is going to catch some flack form people who want MAME and the ROMs updated, but I've had two older boxes that both wound up with disabled onboard USB after a Windows update, and neither had PS/2 style connectors (I ended up turning both into Linux boxes), not something I want to have happen to my MAME rig.

All in all, I think Route2 gets you playing quicker.