Making of an Arcade Frontend - Prolog

So, if anybody follows my wife's blog you'll have probably heard that I've been building a MAME cabinet. Now I'm not going to talk about the actual physical construction much. If you're interested in that I took plans for the TaitoRama cabinet from Project MAME as the base. After that I converted the measurements from Metric to Imperial so that I could build it using the tools I have. In the process I also altered the dimensions slightly, increasing the height of the cabinet to exactly 6 feet tall from at the peak.

The assembly is now done enough for me to start the fun part. Trying it out and tuning the UI.

The actual working part is a PC running Windows 7 which I put together for about 700 bucks including the monitor and OS. The overkill hardware means I can run stuff other than just MAME smoothly as long as it works well with a 6 button arcade control setup. (Street Fighter 4 is on my shopping list for this thing.) It works, it runs the games I want but... it's still a desktop PC. It doesn't look like an arcade cabinet, and certainly doesn't work with arcade controls.

I need a frontend to make the cabinet more snazzy. I need something to start up my games that works with the arcade controls, and I need to do something to make the PC look... well... less like a PC. Especially when booting. Every frigging machine out there has the same POST, Starting Windows, Login, Desktop crap; and I don't want to see that when turning on my arcade cabinet.

To do that, I have turned to the intertubes and found two pieces of the puzzle. The first is a simple registry key built into Windows 7. Turning it on enables support for a customized login/logout screen, you will only see it when the PC is turning off but it's a start.

The second piece is a more fun one. It's a program which allows anyone to create a customized animation for when you start up the computer replacing the usual glowy windows logo. It also lets you replace the captions "Starting Windows" and "(C) Microsoft Corporation" In my case I've changed the captions to "Main Screen Turn On" and some random nonsense. The animation is, well, a screen turning on revealing someone you might know. Much more fun.

I haven't found a method to replace the default ASUS POST screen (the image that first appears when the PC turns on) but it should be possible, the OEMs do it after all. However possible firmware hacking can wait, now is the time for getting my games started.

Now there are lots of arcade frontends out there. Many of them even support multiple emulators, which is good. But they all seem to be geared toward running emulators only. Even if they aren't I don't really care, I'm doing this for fun so I'm going to have fun making my own front-end. It will have my own (or my wife's) graphics, and custom made animations plus as much other pizazz as I wish to jam in there.

Also it will let me script in extra behind-the-scenes work for running any game I want. For example, if one game has a rigidly defined control scheme (say, Melty Blood) I can reconfigure the arcade controller's driver to work with that game. So, not only can I play awesomeness such as Contra, DoDonPachi, Donkey Kong and Metal Slug with MAME, I can also play I Wanna be The Guy, Cho Ren Sha 68k, and other non-emulated games.

More details to come.