All this playing of older games has got me thinking about a dimension of gaming that I never experienced: arcades. This is partly because the arcade heyday was over when I was in nappies and partly because I don't think Arcades were ever big in rural Northern England. As such, beyond the odd lightgun or racing game in a service station, laser quest or anywhere else that was equally... seedy, arcade games pretty much passed me by.
However, this may be about to change. Having seen how easy it looks to build a MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) cabinet out of obsolete PC components (which since I throw nothing out, I'm swimming in). Hardware wise, the build is pretty much just modular PC stuff, with a little soldering being needed to rig up the interface buttons and sticks but little else. The only difficult part really looks to be the cabinet itself, the rest I could do in an afternoon. Even then, I have a jigsaw, hands, and rudimentary abilities with tape measure and marker! This will just be going on the heap of stuff to do, but hopefully posting it here will mean it gets done.
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