How many of you have a dedicated emulation system at home setup with all of the best emulators and rom collections so that all the greatest games are ready and waiting for you to play them?

I know that DC has one, and I do too. I was wondering if anyone else also has one.

Have you ever been tempted to build your own arcade machine? A MAME cabinet. Getting hold of an old real arcade machine and refurbishing it and converting it over to run with a PC inside, or building one from scratch?
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Working on it at the moment, not too sure about putting it in a cabinet yet for space reasons, but want to get a machine set up that will be primarily for emulation and have a hard disk full of classic games to play.
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Yep, I still have my barebone with all my emulation, Competition Pro stick and my X-Arcade. I use it mostly for updating though, but if I really need it, I know that it's there

I will post a screenshot here of my desktop, so people can see what is installed, though only showing the icons on the desktop of emulators that actually are running, not what's ALL installed.

I would like to have a cabinet, already thought of buying one through XGaming, but shipping from the US to Europe?? I cannot built one by myself, I don't have the ability to.

But as I already mentioned, I would need some spare space at my home to install one, and for which use? Probably none. But as we are a bit the same Harrison, you understand what I mean
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I wouldn't mind having one system strictly for games, but I just don't have the money or space to do it at the moment. My current PC has plenty of space on it though and I have lots of full ROM sets loaded: Amiga, SNES, NES, Genesis, Atari, Commodore 64, TG16, etc.
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Having the space to situate an arcade cabinet is definitely the biggest problem. That is why I dismantled my self built cabinet a couple of years ago. It was huge and used up a lot of space. It ended up being the garage unused and eventually I dismantled it completely.

I am hoping to find the time to build a new smaller one at some point this year. The biggest difference will be to use an LCD instead of a CRT monitor. This has the disadvantage that my lightgun won't work any longer, but it's a small price to pay for the amount of room saved and there are not that many lightgun games for the PC or in MAME. I can always hook the gun up to a different system with a CRT when I wish to play those.

When I eventually get round to begin making the new system I will document the build and post it's progress on the forum as I go. This time I want to really take time to make it as nice as I can and even include a working coin slot with it's coin return buttons linked to the MAME add coin function. I also want to design full cabinet art transfers and get them professionally printed out to stick to the sides of the cabinet. I didn't try that with my original cabinet, that was just spray painted black and made from particle board. I also want to make it out of decent materials this time and will utilise my parents large garage to build it (if they will let me, or when they are on holiday ).

As for using the system, I would definitely get a lot of use out of it. Having a dedicated MAME cabinet definitely makes you play the games a lot more than just having the emulators on a normal PC.
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That's indeed true.
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Here's an actual screenshot of my dedicated emulation barebone system (could call it DEBS ), in 1024 pix, in 1280 pix you wouldn't probably recognize the icons.



You can click to enlarge (just in case)
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Very nice collection of emulators indeed.

How come you have MAME 0.106 as well as the latest one installed?
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I know you would ask. Because 0.106 is the last one to use scanlines.
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Ah, I see. Makes sense.
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