Ultimate MAME Box

A few years ago I had this sudden desire to start collecting the arcade games I remember from my childhood in the 80s. Im not completely certain why this notion suddenly took hold of me seemingly out of the blue. Maybe it was the nearly mint Pac-Man machine I kept walking by at the Bistro at Sweet Briar College where I work. It wasnt getting a lot of play there in the late nineties where it had lived a fairly sheltered existance for nearly 20 years.To some extent Im certain I had the sudden realization that it might be possible to actually own an arcade game now. I was older and had an income higher than I did when I was ten years old and had to think twice about spending a whole quarter in such a fleeting manner. As a child in the 80s the thought of owning an actual arcade game was somewhat akin to the likelihood that I could take a ride on the space shuttle just by asking nicely. This was a time when the height of excitement was a gradeschool friend having a birthday party that included a set number of FREE tokens for the gameroom at the local Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. The choices and spending power in that couple of hours was overwhelming.Maybe it was the fact that I grew up immersed in computers and did play a lot games on the Atari 2600, my Commodore 64 or a friends ColecoVision. This was the era when finding a console version that came close to the real game was a challenge that made the genuine arcades a luxury for their graphical prowess if not the big screen and the neat lighted marquees. There was a certain ambience to an 80s gameroom filled with noisy arcades that added a lot to the experience.
http://sparhawk.sbc.edu/mame/