I want to share the story of that other cabinet. I didn't intend for this to be so long-winded, but I thank anyone that reads it.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a happy little kid, a Nintendo WHORE. But I had just gotten to the point where Mom would actually leave me alone while she went shopping at the mall, that's when I became a hopeless arcade junkie. (In ADDITION to my Nintendo addiction, not replacing it!) So my whole life revolved around Nintendo and arcade games.
One evening in the fall of 1989 I was with my parents at a Toys R Us, Christmas shopping. Making my way down the aisle of action figures around to the video games, the most wonderous thing in the world was standing in front of me- an arcade cabinet. A big, white arcade cabinet running... Super Mario Bros.? That was a Nintendo in there! It was the Pro-Play Home Arcade, just add your own TV and a Nintendo, and you had an ARCADE game, IN YOUR HOUSE! I freaked out, it was like the Trix rabbit finding a big tub of... Trix. With a $250.00 price tag it was way out of my range, (even for Xmas) but imagine my shock when my parents actually offered to get it for me! (for Xmas!) I think my mom saw it as "furniture" as opposed to a transforming robot that would break eventually. I couldn't open it until Christmas, of course, and the wait was excruciating! But Dec. 25, 1989.. that was it, man... my dad was putting the cabinet together, and I actually assembled the control panel... a little kid, snappin' connectors onto those Cherry switches, trying to get that goddamn E-clip to hold the actuator onto the joystick... it was fate.
Here's an ad for it, (prototype) it did come with graphics and everything. You can see an original on this guy's page here-
http://robotron.freeservers.com/proplay.html
Having that thing in my room was a dream, I'd play NES Double Dragon and imagine I was playing the arcade game, imagine the ambient sounds of the arcade.Sometimes I would just turn off the NES and imagine I was playing Golden Axe or something. Playing stuff like Legend of Zelda was kind of wierd, but I got over it. That cabinet kept me sane those weekends I yearned to go to the arcade, but mom wasn't going to the mall. I felt really good just having it there. I even cut the Nintendo logo out of one of those little NES pack-in posters and made a little marqee for it. I loved it to death.
But then something happend, the 16-bit era had come in. I moved on to SNES like all the other loyal Nintendo Power subscribers, but it wasn't compatible with my Pro-Play cabinet. As I evolved further away from the NES, I got a new TV that wouldn't fit in the cabinet, wound up ditching the old one. And I had a hot "Championship Joystick", an arcade stick for the SNES that used "Real (cheap) arcade parts". Whenever a switch would go bad, I'd just gut one of the Cherry switches out of the old cabinet and replace it. By the time the Playstation/Saturn era moved in, the Pro-Play cabinet was a shelf. I'd throw papers, books and things in where the monitor was supposed to be, hang posters on it, the control panel had been robbed of most of it's good parts, I think a joystick was missing... it was ghetto, man. My old friend was useless, and neglected. I still wanted a cabinet, but I wasn't 1337 enough to mod it back then. That and we didn't have the internet to order parts and stuff. So I eventually just put it out of its misery, dismantled it and put it away.
I grew up a bit (on the outside anyway) and moved out, got my own place, etc. and brought the remains of the old Pro-Play cabinet with me. I was determined to bring it back to life, restore it's dignity, you know. I could have restored it into it's original form, and put another NES in there. But as much fun as I had back then, I actually enjoy playing NES games the "right" way, rather than standing at an arcade cabinet. So I admit I simply wouldn't use it much, and that's no fun. So I gots me an Xbox. (I know, I can hear you groaning) Modded it, and threw MAME on there. Drilled a few holes in the control panel, got some brand new arcade controls and did a pad-hack to some Xbox controllers. Got a 20" Sanyo flat CRT (A hell of alot nicer than that 13" RCA XL 100 with the UHF dials I had originally!) and set it all up, cleaned it, new bezel, little bit of touch-up paint, it's back in the game!
So to me, it's like being reunited with my old friend; a huge part of my gaming history. And it can now play all those games I only imagined as a kid, like realizing an old dream, you know? I do have a sentamental attachment to it, so you understand why I feel rather proud of having it share the spotlight with the mighty Neo Geo.
By the way, I was actually thinking of nuking the MAME and get a supergun/JAMMA etc. setup for it. But I don't want to take it that far away form the intent that it's meant to have a console in it- that's part of it's charm, I think. So I feel MAME suits it better than actual hardware, does that make sense? And I like the versatility of the modded Xbox. (I can play DOA3, Dragon's Lair DVDs, etc.)
So, that's why I have a MAME cabinet.
