MAME Christmas

It's been a tough past few months.  We tried to start our own work-from-home eBay based business selling women's clothing, and thanks to a worsening economy and non-stop sales all throughout the entire holiday season at the mall and on eBay itself, our sales have been pretty much nonexistent for the past several weeks.

Thankfully the grandparents have all sent gifts for the girls this year, which means that there won't be a completely empty space beneath the Christmas tree.  I also wanted to do something special for them, and being a bit of a computer geek and having a bit of a hoard of this and that in computer components and whatnot, I decided to put together a Mame system.

To make things a bit simpler I appropriated Autumn's PC - she always complains about how slow it is and how it can't run the same games that Willow's can, which means she typically "borrows" Willow's computer most of the time.  I disassembled it, replaced the Celeron 1.8GHz processor with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz that I had scavenged from a dead machine, and put everything into a sweet looking green computer case with a clear plexiglass window on the side.  I also added green cathodes for interior lighting to give it a nice alien glow.

I then gathered together three working USB gamepads (we had a 4th but someone bit into the cable and it no longer functions) and a secret jewel in my stash - an S-Video cable.  Part of the reason I chose Autumn's system was that it had S-Video out on the GeForce 4000 video card.

After assembling everything I installed Mame32 (for Windows) and hunted down some classics that support more than 2 players (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 & 2, and also The Simpsons).  There were also several PC games that work rather nicely on the 27" television set I hooked the system up to via the S-Video cable.  I ran a CAT5 network cable into the room so the system has internet, which allows the kids to watch Netflix and Hulu movies on the TV set instead of being forced to use their much smaller monitors.  Autumn has been asking me if she can play the Torchlight demo on my computer, so I grabbed a copy of that via Steam for the system too - now she can play it on an even bigger screen than mine!

So we now finally have a flexible game system that supports more than 2 players (which is important when there are 4 girls in the house who all like video games) and has a lot of room for growth.  I plan to add some other emulators as time permits over the next few weeks.