You are right that it’s still not the same, even when you own a real machine. One of my greatest disappointments is Gauntlet. When I was a kid my friends and I used to go to the arcade and play Gauntlet together. If you’ve ever played it (I’m sure you have) you know the only limitation is your “health”, which you can buy at any given time with another quarter. When the game is on free play, you can now play forever (literally forever — the game does not end). If we’re going to play Gauntlet, we have to make rules like “each person is only allowed eight credits” or something like that. Otherwise my friends will play all night and I will go back in the house and watch TV until they get tired of shooting the food. Sometimes I think Peter Hirschberg (owner of Luna City Arcade) has the right idea. All his machines are set to accept quarters and he has coin changers in his home arcade. (http://www.lunacityarcade.com) He must not have kids or friends like me; my pals would take all the quarters and replace them with slugs.

There are very few issues I am black or white about, and MAME vs. the real thing is one of them; I see the advantages of both. If I were only going to own cabinet, I would own a MAME machine over a Neo Geo cabinet for exactly the reason you mentioned. In fact, with a fast enough PC you should be able to play all the Neo Geo games on it anyway, so you’re not really losing anything and you’ll be gaining a lot more games. If you had told me you were doing it to a classic cabinet I might have cringed a little, but I don’t think Neo Geo machines are particularly collectable or valuable (I paid less than $200 for each of mine) so if you’re going to MAME a cabinet, that’s not a terrible one to do it on. And, truth be told, you should be able to sell the PCB and your games (and the monitor, depending on your plans) and cover the cost of your entire cabinet, so that’s a plus too, right?

I recently picked up a 16-in-1 Neo Geo cart and am about to buy one of the new 100-in-1 carts (100 Neo Geo games on one cart). That gets into a pretty weird debate on its own, doesn’t it? Is that emulation at that point? Real hardware, real cabinet, pirate game? Could anybody tell? Probably not. Will they tell you they can? Probably so.

For me at the end of the day it’s all about playing games and enjoying what you got! Good luck with your cabinet — I expect to see before and after pictures when you’re all through!

You state that someone who gets a mame setup and gets all the ROMS has way too many games and this is correct. It is likely they will skip from one to the other and not put in the time it takes to really get to know a game.

There is a flip side to this and that is, as an arcade game collector, and thus against mame you end up making a list and whittling that list down to a handful (comparitively) of games you want to collect. If you stick strictly to this you will miss out on playing a great many games. So what is better, playing a hand full of games more, or playing many games less?

Also, if you own an original machine complete with 1 game board, but you are still not putting your actual money in it (which is then gone forever) you will not be getting the arcade experience either. Part of the arcade experience was rocking up to an arcade with a set amount of coins, then evaluating what was there and deciding what you would put your dosh in. Maybe the Double Dragon because the elbow smash can get you a long way, maybe street fighter 2 because it is more challenging but is shorter. Or TMNT for similar reasons. Another part of the arcade experience is battling to get past a point, with a finite amount of money. At home you can just keep continuing till you finish the game, at the arcade you run out of money or time.

So, with what I type above it is clear that the only way to get a real, authentic arcade experiece is to visit an arcade and go through the process of spending some of your hard earned.

As for Mame vs Real. I own a Neo Geo cab and about 8 game cartrdiges for it. I am in the process of converting it to Mame. Why? Because I want the freedom to load up any game I wish to play, and play it on an arcade machine for as close to the authentic arcade experience I can get.

I’ve also had the same experience as you with emulation, that I end up with a stack of games and rarely venture out of my comfort zone of the things I remember. It’s cool to point at my cabinet and say “I have 729 games here!”, but I could count those I’ve played for more than 5 minutes on two hands. I often wonder what the point was of going to the effort of tracking down so many ROMs. There are really only a few situations where it makes sense – the two you listed above (you probably have everyone else’s favorite game too, and it’s already there when you want to try a recommendation), plus if your frontend has a Random button then you’ve got more to select from.

I have another set of questions for you though, since I’ve been considering setting up a “game room” type area in my garage: you’ve got an arcade in your backyard filled with a wide range of classic games, which in itself is super awesome. But from your perspective, what is it about your game room that sets it apart from others? What items (or paint job or whatever) are you most proud of?

I built my MAME cabinet because I knew my wife would not allow more than one cabinet in the house. After hauling it up the staircase in my new house I think I made the right decision. Sold my Street Fighter2: Championchip Edition and boards to offset the price of building it from the ground up. No cabinets were destroyed in the making.

Not having the space for my own arcade, I may build a MAME cabinet for myself at some point, mainly because it’s better than nothing.