Ideas from MGC 2025

Performa

Performa

Member
Midwest Gaming Classic has hundreds of video games on the floor to play, but what if you wanted to share a video game but didn't have the room to store/haul a full size arcade machine? For the longest time I figured folks just compromised and went without. Then I saw what some of the MGC exhibitors were doing.



This is the 3DO M2 setup, but there were about six others made up of various historically noteworthy or "interesting' arcade systems (like the Sega Naomi) all set up this same way. I did see some of these last year, bu didn't really pay them much attention. This year, it fully dawned on me what a brilliant idea this is.

It's a portable arcade machine. The real deal in every way that really matters.



Huh. That seems like the sort of thing WE would do... Hmm...

I have no immediate plans to pursue this, but at it's heart, an arcade machine is a logic board, power supply, a harness to the controllers (which can be adapted to generic USB sticks today) and a monitor. All the accessories aside from the main board aren't too hard to get a hold of...

Anyway, I feel we'd need to present things in a somewhat different way for our audiences, but I think there's potential here- especially if someone in the club has a lonely arcade PCB floating around in mothballs somewhere we could try out this way. If that's you, reach out!

What do you all think? Cool idea? Crazy idea? Let me know what you think. 😁
 
Spudster

Spudster

Member
Having my own arcade cabinet, I did some looking around and yeah, you can get these cheap JAMMA-conversion boards that allow for connecting controllers and standard VGA monitors to JAMMA-based arcade boards. It was awhile ago, but if memory serves they weren't all that expensive. Seemed most of the cost would be obtaining the JAMMA board and controllers. Of course, thanks to the new tariffs, we have to re-think "cheap."
 
Performa

Performa

Member
Spudster said:
Having my own arcade cabinet, I did some looking around and yeah, you can get these cheap JAMMA-conversion boards that allow for connecting controllers and standard VGA monitors to JAMMA-based arcade boards. It was awhile ago, but if memory serves they weren't all that expensive. Seemed most of the cost would be obtaining the JAMMA board and controllers. Of course, thanks to the new tariffs, we have to re-think "cheap."
Click to expand...
True that. I have to keep "re-estimating" the cost of everything after the trump taxes. Ugh.

I've done some poking around as well and found that a complete kit of parts for one of those "multi-game" boards (of which I have extremely high hopes /s) is "about" $100 as of this writing. Assuming the state of the world doesn't spiral too badly, I'd think we could experiment with something like this later this year.I've shared this idea with the guys from Evercon, so the odds that something might come our way have improved too. 😃
 
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