Last time we went over cabinet selection and repair; this time we are going to look at the PC guts inside. You won't need a state of the art PC to run most arcade games. Remember these are games released more than a decade ago. The Pc we are using is an off the shelf Compaq Presario from 2006. A 1.6 ghz single core processor with 2 gigs of ram. When building a Mame cabinet you'll need to consider what games you are going to run on it and more importantly what front-end you will use. A front-end is a game selection interface, this will be the menu you use to pick which game you want to play. We are using the Hyperspin front end a simple, free, good looking frontend that while not a breeze isn't too hard to setup.

Next time, I'll discuss control choices and hotkey mapping.