This project was conceived about 10 years ago, and at the time was going to be just one of about five or more different MAME cabinet projects. If you don't know exactly what a "MAME cabinet" is, a Google search will bring up tons of websites with more than you've ever wanted to know on the subject. For the completely uninitiated, the Wikipedia article would probably be the best place to start.
As it stands now, three projects remain... Protovision UGM (I started a blog about this one a couple years ago), SUPER GAMES MUSEUM (aka "JapaniMAME"), and FLYNN'S Retro Arcade. The Protovision UGM (Universal Game Machine) is mostly an insurance policy in case for any reason I can no longer store my two arcade machines (or in case they never get built in the first place). It's a simple PC in a small desktop-style case (i.e., horizontal like stereo equipment rather than being a standard PC tower) containing all the different emulators and games I could possibly want to play in a much more portable "console" configuration. "FLYNN'S Retro Arcade" will be built into a smaller "cabaret" cabinet, and will be focused on games with a horizontal screen, especially those that had a vector display.
This blog, however, is about JapaniMAME. Why "JapaniMAME"? Well, the name is basically a portmanteau (two or more words put together) of Japan, anime, and MAME. The project doesn't really have a lot to do with anime, it was just a convenient way to link together the words "Japan" and "MAME". The idea was to make something that seemed like it had been made in Japan and imported for the USA. A big influence on the idea was the Namco Museum series of games for the original PlayStation console. For some reason, even the US versions of those compilations included the Japanese artwork and merchandise for the games included in each one, and in the virtual "rooms" where you could walk up to an arcade machine, it was often a Japanese-style cocktail table rather than the standard "upright" arcade cabinets that are more common in the US.
Coincidentally, the cocktail table I chose for the project looks very similar to the representations of the machines in Namco's virtual museum. This was somewhat by design, because most (if not all) of the cocktail tables in the US are made of wood with cheap woodgrain veneer on them, and I really didn't like that look. Not only that, a lot of those machines were PAC-MAN, Ms. PAC-MAN, or other popular games, so the price was quite high. Not that I couldn't find a "gutted" non-working cabinet, but the wood on those was often warped by water or otherwise damaged. The one I chose is almost 100% metal, and compared to the wooden boxes I just described, really had a look that said "this was made in Japan", which is precisely what I wanted.
As it turned out, the machine I bought actually worked, and even though it wasn't my first arcade game purchase, it was the first, and as of right now the ONLY working arcade machine I've ever owned. I still got a good deal on it, but because I made the deal with a lower-level employee rather than the owner of the shop, the owner refused to deliver it when he found out how little I was paying. Fair enough, so I went to the shop and was extremely lucky in that with the legs removed, the bulk of the machine actually fit in the passenger seat of my small car. I put the legs in the trunk, and while it wasn't a lot of fun dragging it out of my car and down to my basement apartment, I didn't have to pay extra to have it delivered.
Originally, the machine had been a Nintendo "Popeye", but it had been converted to a newer game, "The Legend of KAGE". Converting older games that weren't making a lot of money into more modern ones was a common practice with video games, since it was relatively easy, and a lot of manufacturers actually sold "kits" instead of whole machines just for that purpose. People who collect arcade games often avoid conversions, or when possible, restore them to their original state, but since I was going to gut the cabinet anyway, I didn't really care. I definitely took the opportunity to play several games of Legend of KAGE, but I was also very eager to get into the guts of the machine and make it into my own project. As it turned out, the fact that it had been converted helped me out a lot, since holes for two standard-sized buttons had been drilled where the single smaller button had been on the Popeye control panels.
The machine actually sat empty for quite a while, since as I said, I had ideas for five or six different projects floating around in my head. At the time, I was focused on my first MAME project, originally a non-working Asteroids machine. I had gutted the cabinet, stripped off the sideart (a long process, NOT fun, but certainly rewarding once it was all gone) and installed the only loose PC hardware I could afford. I eventually realized that it wasn't nearly fast enough to run all the games I wanted to play (a classic MAME dilemma), so I took it out of the Asteroids cabinet and created new custom brackets, wiring, etc. for the cocktail table. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for my main PC to break down (yes, I actually had to use PCs back then, even though I'm all Mac now), so I had to take the PC hardware out of the cocktail table and install it in a standard PC case so I could get online, etc.
Well, that pretty much brings us up to today, even though that whole "PC swap" issue happened several years ago. The short version of what happened in the interim is that the cabinet sat empty while I worked on a million other projects, mostly unrelated to arcade games, and I moved three times. In that process, I went from a total of four or five full-sized arcade cabinets a mini "cabaret" cabinet and a "bartop" cabinet (mostly empty, all non-working) in addition to the cocktail table, to just the mini-cab and the cocktail as of today. I got back into the whole MAME thing a couple years ago when I started the Protovision project, but only just recently did anything toward getting one of the arcade machines running.
That's it for now... in the next post, I should be including a photo of what the cabinet originally looked like (I don't have a photo of my cabinet, so I'll have to just use a picture of another Popeye cocktail as an example). I'm also hoping to post some of the graphics I did for the original SUPER GAMES MUSEUM menu -- nothing was completed, but a startup animation was done, as well as the beginnings of a menu system. If I can rescue the images from the old PC I used (yes, I still have it), I'll try to post them here.
Thanks for reading, everyone!
