mame it up
My friend Derek has a Tekken cabinet. He's had this thing for years with the intention of making a MAME cabinet, but thus far, there's been no progress on this front. The big problem has mostly been the fact that he would have to build a competent machine to run MAME.
So last night Derek, Brandon, and myself are discussing this, among other topics, and we get on the subject of modded xboxes. And that's when it hits us all at the same time: Why not just use an Xbox? The emulators for it are damn good, and optimized for the platform. Derek has a plethora of hard drives(and can order one via work if none of those work), and the parts themselves for the cab are already here from when the previous owners(Derek's arcade buddies) planned on fixing it up to play Tekken. And with an Xbox, one could also use Xbox games, allowing us to play stuff like SF3: 3rd Strike's Xbox ports.
We drew up a list of what we'd actually need to buy. It came down to an Xbox SCART cable, and some controller extensions. Total cost: 10 bucks. Derek's got the monitor that he wanted to pop in it. The tricky part would be connecting the arcade controls to the console, but then I remembered that a fellow I know, Grego, builds arcade sticks for money around here. He'd probably be familiar with what wire would connect to what to get it going properly. Derek also wants to build a new control panel that is roomier, and if he wants to add in a trackball and spinner controls, that could be tricker(but could be hooked into the Xbox analog stick).
Long story short? It'll probably be a few months, since he is moving to a new house, but a MAME cabinet seems well within our grasp.
Also, I saw Indiana Jones 4, and it was kickass awesome. Totally better than Temple of Doom.
So last night Derek, Brandon, and myself are discussing this, among other topics, and we get on the subject of modded xboxes. And that's when it hits us all at the same time: Why not just use an Xbox? The emulators for it are damn good, and optimized for the platform. Derek has a plethora of hard drives(and can order one via work if none of those work), and the parts themselves for the cab are already here from when the previous owners(Derek's arcade buddies) planned on fixing it up to play Tekken. And with an Xbox, one could also use Xbox games, allowing us to play stuff like SF3: 3rd Strike's Xbox ports.
We drew up a list of what we'd actually need to buy. It came down to an Xbox SCART cable, and some controller extensions. Total cost: 10 bucks. Derek's got the monitor that he wanted to pop in it. The tricky part would be connecting the arcade controls to the console, but then I remembered that a fellow I know, Grego, builds arcade sticks for money around here. He'd probably be familiar with what wire would connect to what to get it going properly. Derek also wants to build a new control panel that is roomier, and if he wants to add in a trackball and spinner controls, that could be tricker(but could be hooked into the Xbox analog stick).
Long story short? It'll probably be a few months, since he is moving to a new house, but a MAME cabinet seems well within our grasp.
Also, I saw Indiana Jones 4, and it was kickass awesome. Totally better than Temple of Doom.