For the PC, I again raided my scrap pile and came up with an Athlon 800 chip and motherboard, 256MB of RAM, and a tower case with its sides missing. Further rummaging brought up a 1 GB and 800 MB hard disk and a 2MB Diamond Stealth 3D video card. I found an old Compaq 486SX-25 in a closet; ripping this apart yielded a 24X CD-ROM drive and a floppy drive. No power supply was to be found, so I bought one for $25 from CompUSA.
The cabinet has about 160 MAME roms installed. Both MAME .61 and MAME .37b8 are installed; I use the older version for games that really need the tweaked VGA modes to run full-screen. I use Dave Dribin's Game Launcher as my front end. Since it can't cope with two versions of MAME, I wrote a small launcher program that looks for MAME37 on the command line and launches either .59 or .37b8 as appropriate.
The cabinet also contains Space Ace and Dragon's Lair (the old Epicenter versions). Space Ace would run from the hard disk, but I had to leave the Dragon's Lair CD-ROM in the drive.The second hard disk contains an MP3 jukebox program that I wrote just for the cabinet, along with rips from just about every CD I could find in my house.
Due to popular demand, I have modified this jukebox so the controls can be configured (it had been hardcoded to my control panel) and released it as freeware. Click here to go to the DOSCab and WinCab Jukebox page.
