I won’t go
very much into this because either you will be able to make one on your own
without much help, or you have no carpentry skills and don’t want to bother
with making you own cabinet. I custom designed
mine with Wireless Input devices, a 27” flat screen TV, and a 300watt THX sound
system.
There are
basically three options that you have when creating a MAME Device. They are
Create
a control pad that simply plugs into your existing computer. There are several manufacturers that do this
already, and for about $100 you can have the cheapest option. You can also make your own custom controller
if you have about $100 in materials and 2 weekends of woodworking.
Purchase
a vintage cabinet online and retrofit it with computer, controls, and
Monitor. This pretty much speaks for
itself and can be done for $300 to $800 depending on how much computer
equipment that you have that will fit in the cabinet.
All
out Custom. This is what you want to do
if you want to make an arcade machine that also can be used as a jukebox, media
center, and computer gaming device.
Talking big money here $800 to $3000 could easily be spent on this
one! Pre-built gaming devices like this
start at around $3000 on EBay.
There are
many sources online for this info and you are only limited by your imagination
on this one. Enter “custom MAME” as a
GIS and you will find 1000’s of sites that document custom cabinet builds.
This is the
only part of the MAME build that you actually create that is unique from
everyone else. My machine was custom
built around my TV.