/ Rob Beschizza / 6:57 pm Tue Jan 4, 2011

The cutest Mame cabinet you ever did see

minimamecabinet.jpg Ever built your own Mame cabinet? Owning and anachrofitting an old Jamma box is great fun -- as is the satisfaction of being able to answer the question "What arcade game is that?" by saying "Every one of them!" But it gets old: the huge, 300 pound cabinet; the heavy TV screen or monitor crudely mounted within; and the noisy old PC lurking inside, gobbling energy like a broken fridge. Enter Dean Liou of Envador, who hand-crafted a compact cabinet that rests easily on a desktop and shows off authentic arcade controls and some clever design. "Usually, you have to dedicate a machine to it," Liou said. "Here you just put in your regular laptop and go." The Happ arcade controls are hooked up with an i-Pac USB adapter, and there's a slide-out tray at the bottom to hide a keyboard and mouse.Dreams of owning certain valuable rarities aside, this seems the perfect blend of old and new. It's a one-off, but Liou said he'd consider making one for about $2,000. Here's the story behind it and some video.

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  1. That’s pretty sweet. Except he’s set the controls too high. That would be uncomfortable if you were sitting at a desk in a regular desk chair. I’m curious why his “slide out extra keyboard” appears to be the bottom half of another laptop. It’s like the sawn-in-half lady magic trick, but with a laptop.

  2. @murray – who plays arcade games sitting in a chair? It’s an arcade machine, used by a couple of people standing in front of it…

  3. The whole point of a MAME cabinet is to replicate the arcade experience. Arcade games are big, standup boxes with CRTs in them. Anything else is *not replicating the arcade experience*, so you might as well just play it on your PC.

  4. Not really news, the MAME community has been doing it better, bigger, smaller and cuter for some time now. As for the 2000$ replication price, it can be done for cheaper with some Maker DIY work . . . a lot cheaper :) It’s on like Donkey Kong!

  7. As a collector of vintage arcade machines, I can see why MAME is probably the best solution for most people. Vintage machines are old and cranky now… I’m always wiggling wires or replacing flakey components to keep them going. Plus they take up a lot of space.

    That being said, there’s nothing like playing the real deal. In a lot of cases, emulation is a compromise. Wrong controls- try playing Star Wars without the yoke, for example. Then there are the various monitor types, horizontal versus vertical orientation, raster versus vector to try to emulate as well.

    Plus unless you use a vintage cabinet, your machine really doesn’t have any soul. It wasn’t there… it’s new. There is something special about interacting with an authentic machine, possibly the same one you played at the arcade / pizza parlor / 7-Eleven back in the day as a bratty 12-year old 80’s kid.

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