Make Your Own Arcade

Make Your Own Arcade
With emulating software, an old PC and an empty game cabinet, you can recreate a classic arcade in your living room.

Space Invaders. Battlezone. Pac-Man. Donkey Kong. Mortal Kombat. Anyone who spent a geeky adolescence haunting loud, dimly lit arcades knows that playing those games on a PC just isn't the same--a keyboard is a poor replacement for a joystick, and most PCs don't stand up to even a single full body slam.

So Tim Eckel, a self-employed systems analyst, devised a compromise. He loaded an aging PC with MAME, a program that emulates old hardware so it can run more than 2,700 arcade games, and mounted it in a real game cabinet rescued from the junkyard. Replacing the picture tube with a used monitor and wiring controllers to a keyboard, he squeezed the entire arcade of his youth into one fairly inexpensive box.

Dozens of enthusiasts have followed the trail he blazed--check out arcadeathome.com for a gallery of home-built boxes, and the other "Sources" (below) for all the info you need to create your own.