SpiffMAME: Background
SpiffMAME is my MAME-cabinet, which I have spent countless hours building/rebuilding. In this article I will try to write a little about the background for building SpiffMAME, and some of the choices in the early stages of the project.
Since I was young I have been very fond of computer games. In particular the older games where graphics and sound are limited by the hardware, and where the game developers have had to be really creative to get good gameplay. But I really think the gameplay of those games is so much better than most of the games developed today on multi-million dollar budgets.
Where I grew up there was no easy access to arcade games, so I cannot say that I spent a lot of time (and money) on this in my youth. I spent a lot of time on my Commodore 64, but only played arcade games when I ocationally found a machine somewhere. Still I have always been intrigued by these machines.
I first got the idea to build my own arcade machine after reading an article in a Danish computer magazine about a guy who built his own cabinet running an early version of MAME. At this time I had been playing a lot with various emulators (mainly C64), and I quickly got hooked on the idea to have my own coin-op machine. Having a machine with a single game was not an option, both in terms of the size, and in terms of the investment (being a student with limited financial freedom), but a machine running MAME could run a wealth of games.
