let's talk about mame cabinets

DPtwiz

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I'm working on designing a mame cab to start selling as a completed unit. I'd like it to appeal to the non collector as well as collectors. We've all seen the threads of hideous mame cabs and awful hacks. So what makes the perfect mame cab that 95% of us would like?

1. Cabinet can't be the size of a refrigerator
2. monitor to opening size proportionate
3. control panel can't have more controls than a 747
4. control panel can't be the size of a 747 wing
5. has to have professional looking art on it

This is going to be a ground up build, and not use an existing cab design of a classic. What controls need to go on it? is thier a "style" of cab i should try to emulate? Let's hear some ideas, or post a pic of what appeals to you.
 
Depends. 95% is a hard target to get. There is a difference between the BYOAC and KLOV crowd when talking about this subject.

The BYOAC group has 1 cab and that is it. Therefore it must support more then 1 type of game. For this crowd, I'd suggest a copy of the SlikStik cab which is a variation of a Midway type cab and the SlikStik CP with slight improvements like hiding the trackball plate and routing out a recess for the joysticks. SlikStik also shipped the cabs unassembled which would help the BYOAC crowd. Another variation on the cab would be to allow it to support leg levelers or wheels as the SlikStik cab could not. This will be a tough market to crack and there is a fair amount of competition.

For the KLOV crowd, good luck. The average KLOVr has more then 1 cab. There needs will be different. Do they want a MAME cab for classics, Fighters, Vertical games? I can't imagine a common consensus on this one. Maybe a 19" Dynamo type cab that allowed the monitor to be switched from Vertical to Horizontal would allow the flexibility.
 
Everyone has different tastes as to what looks 'good' on a cab.
Personally I hate seeing a thousand little graphics on the sides of it, where the maker tried to represent every game in it. Also the aircraft carrier look is pretty bad.

the control panel is going to be the problem, it seems there is where alot of people lose their minds. If you go for fighting cabs then you're looking at 4-5 buttons a side. If you start throwing in a trackball or a spinner or a flight stick it starts getting overwhelming.

Maybe you should focus on what games will be in it first. Perhaps have one design for fighting games, and another design for 'other' games, with the only structural difference being the control panel is different.
 
MAMEers fail so often because they so often try for the "one cab fits all" approach. It doesn't work. You can't have one cabinet that plays all games well. You can't have one control panel with a trackball for Missile Command, six joysticks for X-Men, a flight yoke for Star Wars, a steering wheel for Pole Position, a spinner for Tempest, and a stick with a built-in button for Tron (so you can use the spinner with the other hand).

What you need is a clean, good looking cabinet (Dymo-esque, perhaps), with a monitor mount that's easy to rotate, and a control panel that's easy to change.

The thing is, that differnt people want different things in a MAME cab. I built one years ago for the classics. One joystick, some buttons, that's it. But so many MAME-ers want four sets of controls. That's just too hard to incorporate into most cabinets. I don't know how you're going to make everyone happy - but I think if you design a system with easily swapped control panels, that would be a step in the right direction. That way, the flight yoke and the Tron controls can be on one panel, and the two joysticks with six buttons each can be on another.

-Ian
 
A MAME cabinet should be more like the modern arcade cabinets, not the classic ones because it's not going to typically use a classic monitor.

Newer driving games like "NASCAR" for instance use nice LCD monitors mounted on a frame instead of inside a clunky cabinet.

If I were going to design a MAME cabinet that was using an LCD, I'd redesign the cabinet to be thinner and sleeker, no use for all that huge woodwork if you're not going to fill it with something. In my opinion, that's why the MAME machines usually look like shit.

So I'd do more of a pedestal style but still have the Marquee area above, and have a thinner area to mount the monitor in.

Like Sega's Upright NAOMI cabinet. I never liked the Candy cabinets because they're too small, but the NAOMI ones are awesome. This one's metal of course, but you get my drift.

cabinet.jpg
 
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I think a key for this one to be successful is to stand out from the competition. Therefore, it should be a design where you can swap out control panels very easily. And you should manufacture several different control panels. The control panels should be able to be hot-swapped without having to turn the machine off. If you have a set of about 6 different control panel designs to choose from, folks can order 1 or multiples as it fits their needs. And if you offer a "custom control panel" where the user can design their own (for an additional fee) if none of the provided designs are one they like, you've now got all control panel needs covered.

So, we should all come up with some control panel designs that would make sense not only for KLOV folks, but also for the people that only have 1 cabinet (BYOAC-types). It'd be easy enough to store 3-5 control panels for the one cabinet, and that'd appeal to all folks.

When you're designing one of these, try these principles:

1. Choose "personas" of your target market. Name them and describe their characteristics (but not their wants/needs, you do that later).
2. Create a list of needs without focusing on the details of the implementation (ex: swap control panels, monitor rotation, etc.)
3. Assign your list of needs to the persona types, these won't be mutually exclusive.
4. Assign a priority to your list of needs within each persona type. Use 1, 2, or 3. Where 1 is "must have", 2 is "should have", and 3 is "nice to have". You'll have multiples of each priority.
5. From this list, you can now start to determine how to approach the project and figure out how you're going to implement the needs.

You can probably tell that I have a lot of experience in software design... <grin>
 
Less is more ... Forget trying to add all the different controls like spinners and flight yokes... its not worth it.

2 sticks, 6 buttons each and a 3 1/2" trackball... (maybe a dedicated 4 way stick... however nowadays you can pick up a couple of ultimarc U360 and dynamically configure them per game... solves the qbert issue , 4 way issue and even flight stick issues)

IMHO having swappable panels is a pain in the rear... you could offer a few different configurations but I venture a guess people with swappable panels do very little swapping... You'll probably find the two stick/trackball layout is the best bang for the buck.
 
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Less is more ... Forget trying to add all the different controls like spinners and flight yokes... its not worth it.

2 sticks, 6 buttons each and a 3 1/2" trackball... (maybe a dedicated 4 way stick... however nowadays you can pick up a couple of ultimarc U360 and dynamically configure them per game... solves the qbert issue , 4 way issue and even flight stick issues)


+1

EXACTLY what I did. I got a hold of an empty 4-player NFL Blitz cab and redid the CP for just 2 players. Lots of rooms with a good look to it. I added some extra buttons for "select, volume up and down, esc, etc.", but it didn't distract too much. This is also how I would suggest doing yours....


CIMG4319.jpg
 
I don't think you can successfully do an "One For All" layout. For every few guys that want to play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, you're going to have one that wants to play Tron, Front Line or Ikari Warriors. Lots of people want a dedicated 4 way somewhere on the layout. Swappable panels is a great idea, but its also expensive and has the potential to create a tech support nightmare.

There are already a ton of people making full games and control panels. If you want to compete, I think you need to be able to make what potential customers want, not what you think they should want.

I don't like large do-it-all panels either, so I ended up building 3 different machines to accommodate different layouts.
 
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