Ok, so your girlfriend goes away to Europe for the summer, and your stuck at home in Regina. You've got a tonne of free time, and a few hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket. What do you decide to do:
WHY BUILD A MAME ARCADE OF COURSE

Here are the steps I took, the money I spent and the mistakes I made. Special thanks to my buddy Ross and his girlfriend Anna for their help (you'll see very soon).

Step 1: Buy a Cabinet ($20)

I really lucked out when I found this baby. It was at a pawn shop, and I guess it had been working 'till "the screen died" (really meaning the whole thing was probably fried). Following the age old rule of MAME: "Don't gut a working cabinet", I knew that this unit was to be mine, and I quickly bargained the fellow down from $30 to $20. After bringing it home, I immediately began to hack everything to bits. I took out the dead monitor, the power supply and all of the related wires. Most of it I threw out, although I did keep the PCB (it was the game Devastators), the speaker, the controls and the light for the marquee. The cabinet used a JAMMA board, and had a JAMMA connector, but I already wasn't using the original monitor, and had decided to go a different route than doing a PC to JAMMA type conversion. For this reason, I also cut off the JAMMA connector and began sorting through the wires on the controls. Further examination of the control panel revealed that this was infact not originally a Devastators machine, but rather a cab that had been a single player unit. It's quite possible that it may have been a Pacman or Donkey Kong machine from the good old days ? Whatever it was, I decided that I would quickly rig up a test prototype to see if I could even get anything working.

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