Arcade Project 05: MAME Upright and July 22nd, 2014

Arcade Project 05: MAME Upright

(Original Post at my Gaming Blog)

MAME is practically a must have for any home arcade.  MAME itself is 100% legal and there are legal avenues you can take to get a ton of licensed games.  What MAME does is it emulates old arcade hardware on your computer.  The team originally set up MAME so that arcades of the past could be catalogued and not lost to time.  Every effort is made to get the sound, graphics, and everything documented and set up.  MAME machines come many ways and cost $2500-3000 for a completely pre-made, working out of the box, all in one solution.  If you are willing to put in some elbow grease and you know the right vendors, you can get an amazing one built for about $1000.  Here's how.

RecRoomMasters is a website I have had bookmarked for many a year, because I do one day want to use their products for my own personal machine.  They sell cabinet shells with nothing in them, and they do it at a moderate price with what I've read is high quality designs.  You have options here.  You can get uprights with shelves so you can just sit a TV on top.  They make mini-systems that are made to fit on counter tops.  I want the classic design with enclosed screen, and those run only $300.  They also do this really nice thing where they cut the control board to accept "drop in" solutions to arcade controllers.  Some people scoff at X-Arcade for not using Japanese buttons and switches, but this MAME machine will not be the fighting game machine, it'll be the all around "catch all" arcade experience.  You can get the dual-tank stick for 2 players for $99 from X-Arcade, and there's no weird wiring requirements, or self assembly.  You can even just lift it out of the machine and use it on your coffee table, its versatile.

The insides are rounded out with a budget of $150 for a screen.  You have to have a 22 inch screen with this cabinet, and I would prefer IPS with 5ms timing.  Monitor prices change all the time, but as of now I can get that for under budget.  Just remember you need the back connectors to connect flush to fit this arcade cabinet.  For $50 you can get a decent set of speakers with a subwoofer.  Finally, MAME for the most part doesn't require alot of processing.  Anything done in 3D will not use a video card, so spending a ton for one is not practical, also MAME does not do multi-processors well.  I am good at electronic, I can even computer, but listing parts would be no help as it would be obsolete in 6 months.  A refurb from Newegg generally comes with keyboard and mouse and a good warranty.  I say give yourself $300 and try and get in Intel with as big a hard drive as you can find.  I was lucky in that there are some great sub-200 buck deals right now.

Lastly, RecRoomMasters is great again, they have custom graphics printing options... and they even do the removable, reusable vinyl materials!  This is important for me, as I'll get the itch and want to change how the arcade looks after a while.  For the remaining $200 you can get custom bezels, control, and full side art done from them.  If you don't care so much about custom art, use that money to upgrade your X-arcade to have a 4 way stick added, and a trackball.  $1000 for an arcade like this is not that bad when you look at the inflated prices people are charging for arcades at specialty "vintage" websites.  Its also less stressful than hitting up the Craigslist slot machine of crazy.  85% of the experience you're after can be found using MAME.  The classics are cheaply bundled, you will have no problem finding Pacman, Frogger, Dig Dug and the like.



July 22nd, 2014

Sword Art Online kind of took a weird turn about half way through the series.   I think they were perhaps not super popular in Japan and so they "mainstreamed" it up or something.  It was as if the show started out with great ideas, and once the ratings came in they said "we need to add boobs... a weird WEIRD love triangle story, and something with tentacles".  I still stand by saying that MMORPG fans would get a kick out of the first big story arc, so if you're squeamish about popular trends from Japan, just watch till Episode 14 and say "ok, Disney ending".

With Sword Art Online, and we're about to start Records of Lodoss War(which I"ve seen, but my girl hasn't, and I want it to be her "first" good fantasy anime so she can use it to compare to others), I am knee deep in wanting to play some Dungeons and Dragons.  I came up with calling this D5D instead of D&D 5th, I'm sure I"m not the first.  Like I said, I was going to do a big post on it, but I guess talking a little bit here isn't so bad.  Apparently 4th Edition did have some good things about it, and one of them was the Proficiency rule, and this carries over into 5th.  See, in D&D 3rd, one of the biggest streamlining things was to make all +'s good and all -'s bad.  That's intuitive and there are many people that do not realize this was not the case before.  Well in 3rd, almost everything was a base of -2 or -4 if you tried to do it without training.  The thing is, a character will have more untrained than trained skills, so basically everything they try starts with the added math of doing that negative number.  With 4th and 5th, everyone starts at a base of no modifiers.  Instead you have a Proficiency score that gets added to things you do that are trained.  Instead of applying negative 2 to 90% of actions, you just add the bonus to the 10% you're trained to do.  Its actually really nice.

I'm at the calm before the first storm in FF6.  The banquet scene has come and gone.  Wow, this game is just one iconic scene after another.  I think stuff like this was probably eclipsed by ChronoTrigger's court room scene, but the banquet of FF6 was still really cool for its time.  Basically you have a series of things you can do, and a multitude of questions to answer that can affect how the game plays later.  This was big in JRPG's, and rare in a world before Bioware.  Your choices at this Banquet affected the freedom of several towns, and had a bearing on the tone of the game for a while.  You could answer questions by how you felt or you could try and be diplomatic, it was up to you, and it felt good to have choice.  I always bring Cyan as the representative of Doma, it just feels "right".  After the events that unfold, you have a "sandbox" type section and the freedom to go anywhere to prepare for the next big confrontation.  That's where I am right now.