Nathan S

OK, apologies. Would it be possible for me to send my laptop to someone on this forum (preloaded with my ROMs) and receive back a fully running system I can plug into my arcade cabinet? I would, of course pay for the service. Apologies if I am not allowed to ask this. I'm just trying to come up with a (legal) way to get my system up and running since I don't have the time to work with it. Thank you.

Hi there, I spent some time downloading the first emulator and ran into some issues trying to figure it out. Between kids and work my life is just too hectic to spend hours downloading an troubleshooting emulators and configuring and troubleshooting. As I mentioned above, I already have the hard work done--I built the cabinet and had it working with a raspberry pie setup, however after a while it became unstable and also wouldn't play many of the higher end games I wanted to play. That got me thinking, wondering if I could possibly just buy a package online somewhere that comes with all the emulators and everything configured, either a hard drive or, if the price was right maybe even the PC itself. Honestly, that seems like the only way this is going to get done. Is such a thing possible? I did a little bit of Googling and found this: . Does anyone know anything about it? Do you know of other places I might look? Any help is appreciated! Nathan Edited by Lordmonkus

Great, thanks. So would I want to setup my laptop to autostart bigbox.exe on startup and also to boot directly to the desktop without requiring a password?

Hi all, I am making progress, I've got the Window 8 laptop reformatted, am back at Windows 8.1 and have uninstalled all the junk that ships with the laptop. I downloaded Mesen but have not yet played around with it. A few questions: 1. To see if Mesen is working with my setup (I have an arcade cabinet), would I connect it the cabinet and see how the games work? The setup asked me if i wanted to setup using W, S etc keys and that's what I chose, is that the way to configure it to work with an arcade cabinet? Any tips here would be great. 2. In terms of Launchbox, I haven't yet downloaded the software. I see it is downloadable here: https://www.launchbox-app.com/download. I've seen people reference Big Box, is that a different download? Is that what I want to use on an arcade cabinet. Thanks in advance as I try to get everything working. Nathan

Great. So just to close the loop, do you think my hardware setup would enable playing N64 games? Gamecube? Thanks. I'm sure I'll have lots more questions once I start playing around. I'm sure your guide will come in very handy.

OK, that's really helpful, thank you. So, just to make sure I have my head around how this all works: 1. I would download and install the emulator itself (let's say Mesen for NES), which enables the actual playing of the game on a windows box and then download and install launchbox which is the pretty front end which lets me browse the games across the different emulators I would ultimately have installed. Is that right? 2. How does Big box fit into all this? As near as I could tell it is for a big screen experience, which I think would map closely to a full arcade cabinet like I have? 3. In terms of this comment: At the risk of being a pain, is there a way you could give me an idea of what you mean by keep the game selection limited? Do you think I could get N64 games running with my setup? I think that's the console that had the games my kids were most interested in. I run BigBox on a very old PC hooked up to my TV but I keep my game selection limited, use a lightweight theme and turn off all the fancy effects in BigBox but still looks great. For reference my system specs are the following: Thanks, you guys rock. Nathan

Hi Neil, Thanks for the reply. Sorry, for #2, I meant to ask, would Launchbox fit the bill in that regard? And, for #1, I'm pretty new to this, what do you mean by it only emulates Arcade games? As opposed to console games? I'm looking to play Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Game Cube games (mostly the nintendo family) and some of the classics like PAc Man, Donkey kong, frogger, Golden Axe etc. Does that help at all? Thanks again.

Hi all, I built an arcade cabinet and was using a raspberry pi with retropie as the brain for the arcade. I have found that it is underpowered and does not play a lot of the games and have found it to be unstable. For example, right now it is not booting, this may be because my kids sometimes probably unplug it without shutting down, but still... I have reimaged the PI in the past and it still happens. I am ready to move on to something else that will both be more stable and play more of the games (e.g. Nintendo Game Cube etc). I have done some research online and am trying to navigate the confusing world of MAME and all the possible front ends etc. That research landed me here. I'm hoping to get some basic questions answered: 1. Is MAME the backend for the arcade system, regardless of the front end? Or...? 2. Launchbox was recommended in some places I came across. Unlike others, I'm less concerned with how pretty the interface looks and that it have the latest bells and whistles, I'm hoping for as straightforward an install and configuration as possible including clear documentation. I don't need it to be the fanciest thing out there and don't plan on customizing it significantly, I'm looking more for ease of install, documentation and stable. 3. Can I get the system (the backend and Launchbox) running and stable on this system: AMD A6 4400M APU with Radeon HD Graphics 2.70GHZ Running windows 8.1 4GB Ram, x64 based processor. It is an old laptop I have lying around, it would be great if I could get it running well on this, if not, I'm willing to invest a few hundred on a PC. 4. I've read some things about downloading rom sets? I have a whole bunch of roms from the retropie system I described above, am I better off downloading a specific ROM set from somewhere to match the system I ultimately end up? Or am I misunderstanding? Any help is greatly appreciated. If there are resources I should read up on, please let me know. Thanks! Nathan