Playstation One in a MAME cabinet

[Dartful Dodger]

I finally got epsxe working on my MAME cab.

I tried to install it a year ago, it wouldn’t load any games so I just gave up. (at the time I was trying to set everything up so I had to prioritize).

I had an itch to play BlastChamber last night so I was up until 2:30am trying to figure it out.(I was missing the plugins UGH!)

Anyway.

After finally getting it to work and loading up Blast Chamber I realized two things:

1)  Blast Chamber sucks.

2)  I think the PS1 in general is going to suck on my cab.

I have a 2 player panel with 1 joystick, 7 buttons and a coin and player button for each player and I can't map my admin buttons (pause(P) or start(ENTER) buttons) so I am 1 button short.
I really want to enjoy the PS1 on my cab, but it doesn’t feel right.

Does anyone have the PS1 in the MAME and actually like it.

If so, how is your Cab set up?

I really want to "want to" play the PS1 again, but I’m losing interest in it.

Right now the reasons for not putting a PS1 on a cab are overwhelmingly obvious, so I don’t need to be convinced to not do it.
 
I want to be convinced on great it is to have in my cab and hear advice for making the PS1 more cab friendly.

[ark_ader]

I used to have it in my cab (when I had one), but it was a pain to keep swapping discs.  Then I had a great idea to mount it like the dreamcast half in the cab, and that got old pretty quick.

Now I just plumb for the titles I think are cab friendly and stick them on the Xbox with CoinOPS.  Games Like Soul Blade and Tekken obviously work, but also Metal Gear Solid and Abe's Odyssey.  The problem stems from on emulation accuracy and they times you play a certain title.  To have one in a cab is not a bad idea, but the ability to play it from ISO is just much a lure.

I would have all my consoles in my cab (if I had one), but having one console in there seems to work just fine. 

If I was you I would just make room inside your marquee area or in the coin door for the slim PS1 or PS2 for easy access.

[Well Fed Games]

I still play my PS1, and just emulate MAME in my cab, but I will say that the PS1 had The Raiden Project, which has Raiden II on it, which I believe is not emulated in MAME, so there is something. And Parappa/Um Jammer Lammy! And Robotron X! (Goes to start up PS1)...

[DaveMMR]

Now I just plumb for the titles I think are cab friendly and stick them on the Xbox with CoinOPS.  Games Like Soul Blade and Tekken obviously work, but also Metal Gear Solid and Abe's Odyssey. 

Is Metal Gear Solid cab friendly? I feel like you'd be standing there doing nothing for long stretches of time.  And unless your cabinet vibrates, the whole Psycho Mantis experience - and Naomi's post-torture therapy - is lost. Minor things, yeah, but that's part of what made the game so awesome back when it first came out.  And I suppose that's the whole thing with most consoles in cabs.  Many games for the NES and beyond are meant to be played on a couch.

That being said, as ark said, there are cab friendly titles for every system (Soul Blade and Tekken as he mentioned are good examples - and yeah maybe even MGS if you already played through it on the original PSX).  Is it worth making concessions for it while designing your cab and wiring?  Only if you really have those games, unavailable by other means that you really want to experience in an arcade setting.  Me, personally, no. So...

I want to be convinced on great it is to have in my cab and hear advice for making the PS1 more cab friendly.

I can't.  These systems just play so much better on the couch in front of a TV.

[bishmasterb]

I have a PS1 in one of my bartops and I love it. It boots fast, always works, no setup, etc.

I keep a Williams classics disc in it and never change it. The controls are setup with dual joysticks specifically for Robotron, but all of the PS1 controls are mapped out.

If it was my only cab, I wouldn't have done it this way, but since I have other cabs this setup works well.

[Malenko]

The main issue is that the best playstation games that are great with arcade controls, are ports of games in mame like the street fighters. Now the tekkens and soul blades and other 3d games that dont run as great in mame are ideal (dont forget blitz but I like the DC version better) so you can run those.  If your PC is good you can also run PS2 emulation as well but its the same story

[racecar]

If you want a good all round fix, I use Coinops 3 in mine. So many updates getting pumped out for it.

There is also final burn, An the xtras packs which are best of console packs with video

[Dartful Dodger]

The main issue is that the best playstation games that are great with arcade controls, are ports of games in mame like the street fighters. Now the tekkens and soul blades and other 3d games that dont run as great in mame are ideal (dont forget blitz but I like the DC version better) so you can run those.  If your PC is good you can also run PS2 emulation as well but its the same story

Yeah, that's the reason I didn't care about getting it up and running a year ago. There are about 3 games I remember loving on my PS1. Playing Blast Chamber burst that bubble.

I'm going to keep it on the cabinet (for nostalgia).

I got Dreamcast running on it last night, so I’ll do the same with that.

For both emulators I’m going to map the whole control panel (p1 and p2) to the player 1 game pad. And I’ll map player 2 and player 3’s game pads to the PS3 controllers I have for the cabinet.

We'll see how that goes.

[yotsuya]

When I set up my first MAME cabinet, I was excited about being able to play MAME, Daphne, Atari, NES, SNES, and SMS on it.

I am the process of redoing it right now. I took off all the console stuff. I just never played it, and when I did, the controls were just too awkward and unnatural.

[Green Giant]

Best bet is:

[Howard_Casto]

Just to really drive in what the others are saying.....  no offense at all, but in general it is a waste of time to put console games on an arcade cabinet both due to control issues AND due to pacing and gameplay differences. 


There are a few strange exceptions though and this list applies to all consoles, not just the psx:

1.  Arcade titles that aren't emulated yet. 

The psx in particular has the best Time Gal and Ninja Hayate ports available (laserdisc games), going even so far as to use the original roms.  This list used to be quite long on the psx, but now that cps2 emulation is long mastered and the simple 3d games are emulated in mame and elsewhere this isn't the case anymore.

2.  Sequels to popular arcade games that never made it back to the arcade. 

Splatterhouse 2 & 3 come to mind on the genesis.  There are a select few games out there that were originally designed to be arcade titles but for whatever reason only got released on consoles.  I can't think of any on the psx though.

3.  Lightgun games.

Of course this only applies if you have a lightgun of some sort.  Gun games are in short supply, even in mame and many of the best ones just aren't emulated yet.  The psx has a pretty beefy selection of gun games taken directly from the arcade that aren't even close to being emulated yet.  I have these, and only these psx games on my own mame cab.


As to how you set it up.....

I typically treat psx titles like I would a pc game, simply because there are so few I would actually want on my cab and psx emulators are tricky.  I might have to load a save state to boot directly into the title screen for example.  (I do this for the laserdisc games perviously mentioned)


Then again take this with a grain of salt as apparently I'm a "Nintendo Fanboy" and I "Hate Sony".  Of course it is true that nostalgia doesn't fall into the equation when I'm making my psx selections.... back then I was playing the infinately superior n64. 

[Dartful Dodger]

The more I play DC and PS1 games the more disappointed I am with them. I remember playing Test Drive 6 and think it’s graphics and game play was incredible.

Wow, did I have low expectations for games back them.

Atari, NES, SNES and Sega play well on my cabinet  they start up pretty quickly, they can be played with out instructions and all the games are smaller than one PS1 ISO.

I gave up on the N64 a year ago because the complex control pad didn't feel right mapped to my control panel.

Now I'm giving up on having the PS1 and DC in my cab. You'll spend more time waiting for intros and navigate the menus to start up the game then you spend actually playing it. The games just aren't any good when compared to my PS3 games and unlike the 16 bit and under consoles they don't have enough of a "I remember that" feeling for me.

Thanks for the tips. Maybe in 10 years when I decide to build another cabinet they'll have better emulators and I'll design a control panel with enough buttons to be PS1/DC friendly.