Jay's

Cabinet

Software

Front-ends

As I stated on the opening page, GameEx is the front-end I chose for my cabinet. I know that there are other front-ends out there that are very configurable and look very nice, but for me GameEx offers the most in the way of configurability and playability. I'm not even going to mention the other front-ends here because frankly after screwing around with them for months and not getting the answers I was looking for or only finding support forums in German, I decided that there had to be a better way. The guy that created GameEx, Tom Speirs, updates his front-end software almost weekly and includes many feature requests that may have been asked for only the day before. I implore you, if you are having a hard time understanding how to get your games up and running, give GameEx a try. But enough harping about GameEx. Lets take a look at....

Probably the most talked about and played emulator for cabinets is Mame (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).

There are many flavors of Mame. There is the plain old command line version of Mame which is what my cab uses. There is AdvanceMame which plays all the roms that Mame does but has more options for video resolutions for real arcade monitors, TVs and such. Mame32 does just the same as Mame but has a gui (graphical user interface) so you get a front-end of sorts to choose games and change settings without using the old command line. All of these play well with GameEx. Mame emulates thousands of arcade games but it does not emulate all of them. For some games you will need another emulator such as ZINC, Kawaks or Model2. For Laser disc games such as Dragon's Lair there is the laserdisc emulator Daphne. The games for Daphne can be very large and will require you to have a big hard drive if you plan to have many of them. You do not have to be stuck just playing arcade games however. there are several console emulators out there for everything from the Atari 2600 up to the Sony Playstation and beyond. In fact it is much harder to find a system that isn't emulated than one that is, granted you won't find PS2, X-Box, X-Box 360 or Nintendo DS emulators out there that will work to any playable level (yet) but there are thousands and thousands of good older emulated games just waiting to be played.

OS

You can play Mame and other emulators on just about every system out there. For me Windows XP seemed to be the most supported operating system so I went with it, But there are other options available. I know that cabs have been made that run DOS, Windows 98, Mac OS, even Linux. If you are thinking you want to run GameEx however, you will want to run Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP or Windows MCE. You will also need the .net framework 2.0, Direct x 9.0 and Windows Media Player 9.