Minneapolis Mame Makers Might Meet

As I've been researching more and more peoples' sites about their own arcade machines, I've stumbled across at least 3 who are here in Minneapolis... The first, Aarghcade looks to be a very nice setup similar to what I'm thinking (though he went prebuilt Control Panel, whereas I'll be custom-tricking mine out). Dan and his friend Theodore have both built their own together. The other, DoughCade II, looks to have every bell and whistle I can think of, and is a glory to behold.

I'm hoping to get to check out both of these masterpieces in person and report a quick review here, as well as tap into some of their experience to guide my process.

In other news, I'm still slogging through the process of sorting MAME Roms into those that I actually want and those that can go to the trash. Thanks to my #ereet friend, Loafhead, i have far more Roms than is really sane, and so begins the process of ridding them of japanese trivia games, cheezy clones, mah-jong games, and other digital detritus. I'm hoping to go with the I'm currently working my way through the games made in 1988 and have almost reached the half-way point in the quality over quantity route for my MAME organization process. After that I might clean up the artwork folder a bit so that it doesn't have videos/art/etc for all the games I'm not using.

I've decided to use Mamewah for my front-end and after hours of bashing my head against .ini files, have finally discovered a 3rd party Mamewah Config utility that allowed me to make the headway required to actually organize and launch the games through the MAME controls. If you've ever wanted to use Mamewah but been intimidated by the setup, this app is for you -- it gives a GUI to all the configuration that must go on to make Mamewah menus work with their games. I've even gotten Atari 2600 working through the same interface, which is nice. Eventually I'll design my own menu background for everything, but for now I'm happy with some off the shelf ones from ScreenshotArchive.

I've also received my first shipment from Ultimarc -- 2x 4/8-way switchable Mag-Stick Plus's, 1P/2P buttons (all their standard buttons were out of stock), and a 2.25" Ultimarc (budget) Trackball w/ plate. I also have my MiniPac PCB now so I can start wiring stuff up to that for use via my computer's USB port. I hope to start a proof of concept Control Panel Monday when I've got some time home without childcare obligations (thanks, Sarah!). I really need to order some more buttons before getting too far on that, but at least getting a board to start with will be nice since I can always add the buttons to it later when shipments arrive.

Here's my current draft of the control panel overlay that I'm designing. It's subject to change (as is the name of the cabinet) but it's where I'm headed at this point...