Building the Perfect Arcade article on GameSpy (EmuMovies Plug)

[Circo]

There is a great set of articles posted over at GameSpy right now having to do with Building your own 1986 arcade cabinet. The latest article (part 3) The Perfect Arcade - Seeking professional help, covers a ton of great links (including EmuMovies). I encourage everyone to digg and share the articles.

In the first part of this series, I discussed the rationale for building an arcade cabinet in the basement. In part two, I walked through the seemingly simple steps involved, from cutting that first piece of wood to wiring up the control panel and mounting your own totally awesome retro marquee.

The end result of the project is immensely satisfying, but if I'd had to go it alone, I'm not sure I ever would have finished.

Unlike orchid fanciers or golf nuts, MAME cabinet-builders have a particular problem when it comes to passing on what they've learned. Once you've built your perfect arcade, chances are, you're done. Not that it gathers dust -- mine doesn't go 48 hours without me firing up something for a quick escape from the present. But since the point of the cabinet is to recreate the past, it's not like Internet communities are getting constant injections of new hotness to keep them going.

Consequently, a Google search for MAME topics and retro arcade-building advice yields countless dead ends. In an effort to shortcut the process of weeding out the crap from the gold, I humbly present a rundown on those resources which, while not all entirely current, remain relevant and useful.

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EmuMovies Excerpt: EmuMovies: A full library of several thousand MAME ROMs can get pretty overwhelming. One good way to browse a multitude of titles is to set up your frontend to show a short video preview of each game before you start it. That's a lot of video -- roughly 15 gigabytes' worth, to be precise -- but they're all available from EmuMovies. Most frontends will play the previews, and you could certainly make the video snaps yourself, but EmuMovies actually has them all on a convenient FTP site. Access is behind a pay wall, but for $15, you can get just a month's access -- or, for $60, you can access it forever. Tons of work is being done to get better artwork and high-definition preview movies for thousands of games, and it actually makes the whole "what the heck game is this?" experience much more palatable.