You know arcade machines, those things that used to be in huge arcades but are now relegated to a pizza parlor or bar? There is a large population of people who collect them. Unfortunately for me, I have no room for one, as they are bigger than they look.
Fortunately, arcade machines are mostly empty, just a bunch of wires, controls, a game board, and a cabinet. All arcade games made from 1986 to the present applies to the "JAMMA" standard of arcade machines. I can plug a game into any machine and it will work. Now, what I'm getting at, a device that allows you to play an arcade game on a home TV or monitor, a Supergun.
That's actually a consolized MVS, kind of the arcade version of a Neo-Geo. JAMMA and Neo-Geo are slightly different, though.
As that video showed, most Superguns are made by hand, which is actually pretty easy. You need a cluster of wires, a standard PC power supply, some method of control, a method of display, and a game board. A good intro to Superguns is here:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/28/how-to-consolize-an-arcade-game/The hardest part is the video encoding. TV monitors cannot take the video arcade games output, so you need to change it. I am personally going to use an RGB monitor from the 80's, but there are various albeit expensive pre-built encoders out there.
As for the controllers, I am wiring up a port to plug in a Neo-Geo controller, to which I will be plugging a PS2 adapter into, because real Neo-Geo controllers are like $40 each.
But yeah, tl;dr, I'm building a machine that allows me to play arcade games at home for free.
