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I wanted to show what is truly unique about this cabinet so I looked for things that no one else did before. First of all I've never seen a corner MAME cabinet before, or a control panel that can be easily changed without removing the whole thing and plugging in another. Also I have never seen anyone incorporate neon into their control panel. My first concept was a huge piece that went around the entire edge of the control panel. I had no way to protect it and it would have taken away from the control panel. So I wanted something small, and that actually had a function on the table. The neon turns on and off to show you what "mode" the cabinet is in. You can read more about it below.

There are the electronically controlled player assignments, for example, whenever you play a 2 player game of Galaga, either both sets of controls would have to be the same or player 1 would have to get up because player 2's controls are mapped totally different so player 2 would have to sit down at player 1's controls to play. The only way player 2's controls will work if they are mapped different than player 1 is if the game is set for cocktail mode which flips the screen for player 2 and therefore niether player would have to move. This is why I didnt build a standard cocktail table, you cant play Joust or NEO-GEO or any other 2 player simulataneous games on a standard cocktail cabinet.

The Power Card. Click here for a diagram of the relays and see how it switches them.

When you want player 1 and player 2's controls to be identical which is the default, you do nothing. When you want player 1 and player 2 to be mapped seperately you slide a credit card sized "key" into its slot and a bank of relays switches over the controls on the endoder and the neon lights up to show you are in seperate mode. You need this for games that use dual sticks like Crazy Climber and Robotron and for 2 player simultaneous games like Joust and most NEO-GEO games. I always wondered what everybody else does on thier cabs? Do you just let player 2 slide into player 1's controls until his/her turn is over on games like Pac-Man?

Then there are cup holders on both sides, plus an ashtray slides into the cup holder and flips up with a spring loaded top. Here is the other cool stuff, in MAME32 you can have a screen shot that comes up when you highlight a game in the list, that would be too easy. I made a graphic for each game that shows what type of controller setup and what the button assignments are for that game on my panel. See the pics below. They are low quality images on this site that load quicker, the original graphics are perfect bitmaps with 16,000,000 color capabilty. The small ones below are in 256 colors, and the button assignmaent were left blank intentionally. These are six of the 20 possible combos of layers in one picture. They were created for scratch in Paint Shop Pro 6 by myself and some nice plug-ins.

Here's what comes up when you highlight a game in MAME32. In the screenshot area, a graphic for each game that tells you what buttons on the control panel to use for that particular game. The button assignment boxes at the bottom were left blank intentionally for the website. Sorry for the bad JPEG compression, these graphics are much nicer and larger looking than they look here.

Below is an actual size image from the game at full resolution

Now on to the specs page.