MAME Machine

G'day all, thought I'd sneak one final blog entry in before Assignment 2b is due, as I now have time to do it having finished my stupid History Assignment.

The subject of this blog entry seemed relevant to this topic, in particular many of the discussions in the Google groups involving new technology replacing old. It involves my love of technology, building stuff and all things nostalgia.


Background

As a child I spent many hours in the local pub while the old man "just finished this round". Much of this time was spent poking twenty cent pieces, one after another, into the 'spacey' (space invaders machine) located in the kids room, where all us kids waited for the old man to "just finish this round". A couple of years ago, I spotted one of these old machines in a pub, and it occurred to me that my very own 'spacey' would be an awesome thing to own. Some preliminary research uncovered the unfortunate fact that a lot of people my age thought their very own 'spacey' would be an awesome thing to own, and that these suckers were now collectable, and very expensive. During my research I also discovered that somebody had written a great piece of software called M.A.M.E (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), that allowed PC users to run ROM versions of all the games that we used to play. Refusing to give up on the idea, which by now was fast becoming an unhealthy obsession, I decided, what if I found a machine that didn't work anymore, ripped the guts of it out, put a PC in it, and ran M.A.M.E on the PC? That would work. And how hard could it be?

My M.A.M.E Machine

Unfortunately I didn't document the making of this machine, so I only have AFTER shots.

Motherboard, power supply, mouse, etc









The process went like this:
- Empty and clean out the old game machine
- Pull apart an old PC no longer being used.
- Put all the pieces of the PC into the game box, wherever they'll fit.
- Drive around at midnight taking discarded old 14" monitors from people's hard rubbish, a few are required.
- Cut the front plastic away from a monitor and stick it in. (Then repeat this process over and over until it has been completed without destroying the monitor.)
- Hook up some speakers.
- Stick your fingers in your ears, and switch on
the power with a long stick, expecting the entire project to explode.

New buttons fixed to boxes made from mum's old table

The next step was to make the control boxes. I ordered all the buttons and joysticks off the net, (company called ozstick). These are wired into a keyboard interface called an IPAC. This programmable device tells the PC to interpret the various button pushes as keyboard punches. ie, button one is CTRL, button two is ALT, up on the joystick is UP ARROW, etc. I even wired up the existing coin mech to this thing so you have to put in 20 cents to play a game.
The boxes these buttons are mounted on I made out of Mum's old dining table. The key to this part is to cut it to bits first, and then ask, 'did you
still want that old table?' after you've finished.

The finished product

The last step was to install and configure all the software to run the games (roms). When you switch the computer on, a Front End program starts up, displaying a list of available games. You select a game, and it runs. Put in 20 cents, and you're away. You exit a game by pressing the PLAYER1 and PLAYER2 buttons simultaneously, which takes you back to the list to pick another game.
This is my finished machine running SPACE INVADERS. Chairs are as uncomfortable now as they were fifteen years ago, but are way cooler now than they were back then.


And that's it. One of the most awesome distractions from doing uni work any '70's series Aussie who was forced to wait for his parents in the pub as a child could want.

Final Notes

During discussions this semester within the Multimedia Literacy Google Group about the role technology is playing in peoples lives these days, it dawned on me that my M.A.M.E project says a lot about my personality, and the bizarre role technology plays in my recreation. This project involved taking an archaic piece of computer technology, and installing into it's empty shell a modern piece of powerful computer technology. The result is a compact piece of modern technology, reduced to running 8 and 16- bit computer games from the late '70's and early '80's that require only a fraction of it's processing capabilities, that now takes up three times the amount of room in the house as it did as a PC. All this for the sake of being able to recapture a moment of my childhood playing pacman. Or was it to avoid doing uni work?