On those rare occasions as a kid, we would get to go to Pizza Hut to eat dinner. Ah, great times… Mom would give me a quarter or two so I could play a video while we were waiting for our food. I was amazed by the cocktail version of Centipede, mesmerized by Pac-Man, and hooked to Ghouls and Ghosts. The year was 1988.

This started a great addiction to video games of all types. I played on my Commodore 64, then moved on to a Super Nintendo one special Christmas. Since then, I got a Sega Genesis, a Playstation, and finally a Playstation 2. This has been fine until now… Recently, I got a strange desire to play some of my old favorites. I started hunting around on the web, looking for a way to relive the past glory. Then I found M.A.M.E. and the solution to my desire. M.A.M.E. stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. And that’s exactly what it does. It lets you play games from Asteroids to Missile Control to X-Men vs. Street Fighter and about 3000 other games (provided you have the roms).

This was all fine and good. Simple games are easy enough to play using the keyboard, but fighting games have too many complex motions that you just can’t achieve with a keyboard. So I bought a cheap joypad from Wal-Mart. This works somewhat better, but not by much. So I remarked to my brother one day, "Wouldn’t it be cool if we could somehow build our own arcade machine?" Nothing feels and works as good as a genuine set of arcade controls. So I set out to troll the web once again…

I found "How to Build a MAME Cabinet in 24 Hours". I was overjoyed! Here was someone with the same crazy ideas I have. He has already built the machine, with authentic arcade controls. Now, I had to have one of my own…

So I started with some sketches. Then I went to AutoCad to refine my plans and so I could look at them in 3 dimensions. Here is a rendering of the controller. This is about as far as I have got at the moment. I have come up with a list of the materials I will need to build my ultimate arcade machine.