2 topics in one

ganonbanned · Post by **ganonbanned** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 10:04 am

The first one is...

are there any good arcade emulators besides mame?

and the other thing is, what are some good frontends that will accept quarters? IE I put a coinslot in there.

Post by **gannon** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 10:53 am

How dedicated do you want it? If you're going for a full dedicated MAME cab, then you can just hack up a keyboard and trace it's matrix, then wire up keys to the controls and coin slots, then in the interface just map the buttons to the keys you wired them to. You could also do all sorts of stuff like a gamepad/usb controlls/etc, but just as easy/easier to hack up a keyboard.

ganonbanned · Post by **ganonbanned** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 2:19 pm

gannon wrote:How dedicated do you want it? If you're going for a full dedicated MAME cab, then you can just hack up a keyboard and trace it's matrix, then wire up keys to the controls and coin slots, then in the interface just map the buttons to the keys you wired them to. You could also do all sorts of stuff like a gamepad/usb controlls/etc, but just as easy/easier to hack up a keyboard.

well im not making a full arcade cabinet, im just getting a PC with a frontend, along with an arcade control panel (i'll link it later), and a coinslot. not that impressive, but my friends will be amazed.

EDIT: here's the controls, if anyone cares

http://www.hanaho.com/Products/HotRodJoystick.php

loup · Post by **loup** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 3:01 pm

Mame is what most people have handle the coin slot input, not the front end

Post by **bicostp** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 7:47 pm

are there any good arcade emulators besides mame?

Maybe, but they might only support certain hardware. Just use MAME; almost everything for arcade emulation works with it.

and the other thing is, what are some good frontends that will accept quarters? IE I put a coinslot in there.

The frontend just launches MAME, it has nothing to do with the coin handling. MAME does that once you run the game. (Have you even used it before?)

If you want a good frontend, look at GameEx. It sorts by manufacturer, year, genre, hardware, and it fills in the game titles and descriptions.

If this is going to hook up to your TV, throw Meedio and some videos on there too. Why not?

ganonbanned · Post by **ganonbanned** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 9:11 pm

bicostp wrote:
are there any good arcade emulators besides mame?
Maybe, but they might only support certain hardware. Just use MAME; almost everything for arcade emulation works with it.

and the other thing is, what are some good frontends that will accept quarters? IE I put a coinslot in there.
The frontend just launches MAME, it has nothing to do with the coin handling. MAME does that once you run the game. (Have you even used it before?)

If you want a good frontend, look at GameEx. It sorts by manufacturer, year, genre, hardware, and it fills in the game titles and descriptions.

If this is going to hook up to your TV, throw Meedio and some videos on there too. Why not?

im using a moniter, this aint nothing fancy. and yes, I've used mame before but not that much, and it was when I was first getting in to emulators.

thanks for the info, people.

Kurt_ · Post by **Kurt_** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 7:42 am

I like MAME32 for it's simplicity. You just have to get it, put the zipped roms in the roms folder, and you're ready to play. I recommend whatever the latest version is but 13 instead of 16 (0.113?). 116 Can't save custom layouts for some reason.

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 12:48 pm

OK, here is what you should know- unless you are positive that you want to risk getting some legal butt-kicking action taken against you, or you know for sure that absolutely no-one living anywhere near you will care you should not use a coin slot in a MAME machine.

Not that I'd be too worried...

Anyway, MAME will of course accept coin inputs, as will pretty much every other arcade emulator that I know of. Secondly, the only frontend I have ever used also happens to accept coin input- ArcadeOS. It's a little dated looking, but for my purposes it worked great, especially since I wanted to use an arcade monitor. This fronted can read coin inputs if you want it to, but in practice I also have my machine set up so that the user can simply pick what game he wants to look at it before he decides to put money in. (or in my case, hit the coin-up button)

Hope that helps

EDIT: I do like the emulator Vantage, it runs all kinds of old-school arcade games, and it's waaay faster than MAME. Being the ultimate cheap-o, I of course like this because I could run cool games on a really cheap computer. NeoRAGE-X is a pretty good NeoGeo emulator, and although MAME is slightly more accurate, having a dedicated emulator lets me run the games on a slower computer than with MAME.