I have 2 old desktops from around '98 and '01 and I'd like to turn one into a MAME emulator or whatever it is. I'm not familiar with any of it, any suggestions for something like that?

You could give Launchbox a try for free. I have been using it for a while and really like it. It is a multipurpose game launcher though, so maybe its not what you want. But you can set up a MAME category. I tried Hyperspin before I found this and it was the most convoluted pile of software I have ever seen, worse than setting up visual pinball. Launchbox is waaay easier, you can do most of the setup just by looking at it and figuring it out.

Here is what my MAME category looks like (its called Arcade here).

lb arcade (resized).jpg

I would love to find an easy to use graphic interface MAME front end that isn't a buggy piece of crap. I have a completely finished and wired cabinet, all of my ROM's filtered, and all of the artwork and even video samples ready to go. I have spent hours and hours trying many of the main front ends out there only to not be able to get it to work right in the end. Most recently I have been playing around with Maximus Arcade from Xgaming but haven't been able to get that 100% either.

There's some love, but I only know Hyperspin and you're not into that so I didn't want to say anything

I use MAMEWAH for my front end. Granted it hasn't been updated in a LONG time but it's been pretty solid in my cab for years now.

I use maximus arcade, really like it..

What are your pc specs that handle hyper? It was the first FE I tried. I don't remember why I scrapped it but PC specs might have had something to do with it.

Get a solid state HDD and use Hyperspin. You can go into HyperHQ and remove a lot of the useless transitions when switching games. It works great.

Cant remember offhand but nothing too major . Built it with semi old parts...old GFX maybe even going back to a Gforce 5200. Ran fine until i took it apart a year or 2 ago.

Same.............Joey

Thank you for this advice. I'm in the same boat as the OP, I have a nice MAME cabinet and I've struggled for years to come up with an interface that the average person can figure out and launch a game on. I've been running Hyperspin for about a year and as visually appealing as that is it really is not easy for the average person to figure out. I'm going to try this Launchbox, looks like what I've been looking for. Thanks!

+1 for Launchbox. I use it as a frontend for everything on my PC, from arcades to consoles to DOS to modern PC games.

BigBox mode is supposed to be the cab mode, I haven't tried it yet.

I use Mala due to it's simplicity. It's also very customizable but I don't do much of that. Hyperspin is just, too much everything for my taste.

I haven't updated my setup in years, no need to. It plays all the games I need and it took quite a while to set up and I don't want to redo everything.

Yeah good info everyone I'll be looking at these suggestions myself. I had a MAME set up before with detached TV and control base and it just took up too much room so i broke it down. Looking to go back to a standard real cabinet and maybe look at diff'rent front ends and ways to deal with everything.

And everything aboot mine was just too much. As we all know the worst part aboot having 1 million games is that you have 1 million games. Just such a pain.

I have Hyperspin on my system, but rarely use it personally. It's cool to show off and looks great in attract mode, but I hate searching and selecting games in it.

I keep an old MAME32 GUI installed and use that for myself. Much simpler for searching and sorting games and just finding them quickly.

If anyone needs a full Hyperspin setup with all the emulators, roms, attract screen movies and artwork for $175 I'll send you a new 2TB external drive ready to go. Plug it in and launch the shortcut. You'll need to configure your controls in each emulator, but saves you a shitload of work and downloading.

I have played around with BigBox, its pretty cool. I think you have to buy the license to use Bigbox, but it is well worth the price.

Personally, I like the minimal approach to my UIs, so I tend to use plain black backgrounds with just poster art or box art and that's it. But if you like the fancier stuff, you can do it all with Launchbox. Those people have some crazy setups, with fanart, game music, AND game movies all integrated into the interface. There are a lot of videos on Youtube that show it, here is a typical one:

For now I am using Launchbox on a typical desktop PC so the regular program works just great with the usual keyboard/mouse setup. But I have used BigBox with the wireless Xbox 360 controller and that works well too. I was thinking about moving the gaming PC to the big living room TV, but then I got a RetroPie set up and that works fine for all the old stuff. The PC games I like are all FPS anyway and its somewhat difficult to play those in the living room.

As far as an arcade cabinet, I don't have that, but I want to build one some day for sure. You can play all those old games great on the TV setup (such as NES, SNES etc) and the MAME games also come up fine, but controllers are the issue. There are some MAME games that work just fine for me with the typical controller (Xbox 360), for example, Asteroids. But most of those games really need the real goods: joystick, trackball, etc. Pacman, Donkey Kong and the like without a real joystick - forget it! Asteroids, Millipede without a trackball - forget it! I'm working on that next.

mamewah. old. easy. fast

I've been using Hyperspin since 2008 and no issues.

36780411053_fe55d193d6_k (resized).jpg

The Hyperspin method of navigating thousands of games via a wheel interface is neat looking, but not efficient. Someone at my house walking up to my arcade machine with Hyperspin running will have no clue WTF to do.

For that many games it's a total nightmare. Even if you make your favorites folder they exit out of that and then you gotta go back in yada yada yada. It really becomes a "hey lets look through the wheel and see how many games there are."

Whoa that's neat, where can you buy the backlit control panel?

Agreed. I've limited my games list to about 30 games, otherwise it's a daunting task just trying to CHOOSE which game you want and the whole point is to be able to play them.

I know lots of people who built their own cab just grab the various torrents floating around with Hyperspin pre-configured with lots of systems and 30,000+ games. My personal Hyperspin setup was built from scratch in the sense that I manually added each system and roms I wanted for it. I took the time to read up whatever I could find back in the day on the forums and experiment myself via trial and error on how to setup the front end. I even learned a bit on how to change the themes because sometimes I didn't like the location or image the author used. Some themes can also be glitchy and need a small code change because the cursor would lose focus on the foreground during the animations resulting in you not being able to scroll the wheel anymore. This is probably what the people above were experiencing so now basically you have to hit ctrl+alt+del to force quit Hyperspin to the desktop. I have a wireless keyboard with touchpad I can connect to my cab in case this ever happens but it hardly ever does because I tested each one of my games to make sure they load and exit properly.

My MAME rom set has expanded over the years based on me watching youtube videos for top 100 games, hidden gems or games that people ask me if I have and when I don't I will check it out myself to see if it is worth adding. When I made my 4 player Nintendo red tent setup I looked for all multiplayer games so I could play co-op with my daughter, nieces and newphews. I don't think it is that difficult to navigate the wheel as everything is sorted alphabetically so up or down to advance by a single game or else left or right to advance 10 games at a time. I never bothered setting up buttons to pull up favorites as most people who come over to play will say do you have Shinobi will just keep scrolling till they get to the letter "S". My current rom count for MAME is 711 unique games and I would say about 5% of these are some of my favorite games growing up playing like the 90's fighters. The rest of the games are just nice to have because sometimes people will just scroll through each game and when they see the preview video they will be like shit I remember playing this growing up but never knew or remembered the name.

You make it yourself, I used Sanwa colored translucent buttons and illuminated it using some LED bars.

My cab is a Vewlix style cab which was used for Street Fighter IV in the arcades. I bought a new Vewlix knock off which was imported from China and basically gutted it. Then I rewired it to suit my needs such as PC running MAME or running modern consoles such as Xbox360, XboxOne, PS3 and PS4. I just finished it a few weeks ago and documented it all here on the local pinball forums

http://www.pinballrevolution.com/threads/vewlix-clone-mame-console-project.6438

Is anyone using Launchbox ons cabinet strictly to play MAME roms? I ask this because it seems like most of the videos I have watched show people navigating using a mouse. On my cabinet I don't have direct access to a mouse or keyboard. So all navigating between games, starting a game, exiting a game, all need to be done via the joystick and buttons.

You would use their BigBox mode for that. Once its launched, you can navigate the whole thing with joystick and buttons, no keyboard or mouse required. But as I said, I'm not sure if anyone is using it for just MAME roms. There should be no reason you couldn't, you would just have the one game system and that's it. However, you do have to pay for their premium license to get the BigBox functionality, so unfortunately you can't try it for free.

I can try to answer any specific questions by firing mine up and playing with it if desired. For now I just have the Xbox 360 wireless controller to test it with.

This might be problematic if you don't have a spare button on your cab that can be mapped to exit MAME.

I've seen cabs that exit to menu by holding the 1P + 2P buttons, but no idea what frontend that is. Could be one of those Chinese 500-in-1 JAMMA boxes.

The 1P + 2P button combo is a default shifted key function to the ESC key on the IPAC2/4. You can download software from Ultimarc site and reflash your IPAC or change the button mapping for UI Cancel in MAME to something else.

I have a modded XBox with Vision as the frontend. Great interface, easy to use. I’m not sure if it’s on the PC.

I've sung the praises of 3dArcade here before, and I'll do so again. Yeah, it's a bear to setup, but it's worth it. I use it for pinball in addition to MAME, and any other emulator as well.

http://www.mameworld.info/3darcade/index.html

3dA2 (resized).jpg

3dA1 (resized).jpg

3dA3 (resized).jpg

I watched a couple of videos, looks cool. But I never saw a video show someone starting a game and playing it.

All you do is walk up to and face whatever game you want to play, hit the "1" key on your keyboard, and it opens that game on whatever emulator you have setup for that particular game. When you're done, hit the "ESC" key, and you're back in the arcade right where you were.

BTW, the Time Out in the second pic above is a replica of the one in the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa, Long Island, circa 1983. Spent a ton of time and ton of quarters there as a kid. The arcade in the third pic is a replica of Peter Hirshberg's now defunct Luna City arcade.

I have love for mame, too.

I want to build one, like a countertop system. I'm not ready to start that for about another year.

Frustrating thing for me is I have the whole thing done except for the FE and getting my VGA card to talk to my WG arcade monitor correctly. I have to keep putting off the needed in depth effort I need to just knock it out which would probably only take a weekend if I really tried. On a good note, I did finally finish my ground up AFM resto after it being in pieces for 5 years lol.

Pretty nice cabs, but do you have enough buttons? :/

Use Atomic FE,nice,free and don't want much PC resources like most of the front end.Easy for configuration.