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Top 10 Mame design tricks that we don't see enough of.
alandrogers:
Well .... I would like to throw in here one of my ideas that's in process at the moment.
WiFi network card with VNC installed = no keyboard needed.
the entire system is completely accessible ... as a networked accessible drive and you can just do system maintenance and updates from your other computer.
AlexKidd:
Putting your arcade computer into standby mode instead of shutting down.
Who needs to disguise windows when you can just leave your frontend running all the time. My setup with mamewah works great. When I am done playing I hit what is normaly the pause button when I am in mame, but it's the standby button when in Mamewah, my computer instantly goes to sleep, my monitor turns off thanks to a smartstrip, the harddrive stops spinning, the CPU fan stops, the powersupply fan stops, the computer is completely silent, only using enough power to keep the contents of RAM intact. When I want to play again I hit the power button and bam, the computer springs back to life and I am instantly back in my frontend. No shutting down, no booting. Initially when I had mamewah itself handling the standby process I had some trouble with my joysticks not responding when the computer woke back up but I just made a autoHotKey script that initiates the standby and bound a button in mamewah to run the script and now it wakes up with no problems. Greatest thing ever.
leapinlew:
Quality instruction graphics built into the theme of the cabinet
Knievel uses them well
Psychotech has some nice cards too
Whether we want to believe it or not, these MAME machines we build can be very confusing to the rookies out there.
RayB:
--- Quote from: leapinlew on March 14, 2007, 12:30:04 am ---Whether we want to believe it or not, these MAME machines we build can be very confusing to the rookies out there.
--- End quote ---
Never mind the rookies, I even confuse MYSELF every time I play the thing!
javeryh:
I don't know if it's a trick or not but anyone who has a joystick or trackball on their control panel should be recessing the mounting plate. It is one of my top pet peeves - there's nothing uglier than the giant 5" black square that surrounds a trackball, IMO.