This is the cabinet lights and accessories page

A MAME cabinet is more than just an upright wooden box with a TV in it. For the full effect, you need a marquee (the lighted panel above the monitor) and a coin door.

Marquee

The marquee on an arcade cabinet is like the marquee in front of a movie theater: designed to advertise and attract. If you're building a MAME cabinet that has a theme, you'll want your marquee to reflect that theme. There are several places online that sell pre-printed marquees, or you could print your own at Kinkos or another printing shop that handles large-format printing.

Once you've obtained the marquee, how you will put it in the cabinet depends on your original plan. In my cabinet there is a "frame" that holds a piece of plexiglas in the marquee area, and the marquee paper (I caved and bought something, rather than doing my own) fits behind this. Below is a photo of my cabs marquee.

 

Having a light behind the marquee makes it look more like a "real" arcade cabinet.

 

The marquee is one of the light sources inside the cabinet that is most likely to leak light. When I constructed my cabinet and installed the marquee and light, there was a lot of ugly light leakage filtering down onto the face of the TV. To resolve this, I bought a piece of black vinyl cloth (essentially fake leather) from the fabric store. I stapled it all across the top, then folded it down behind the light and back towards the front of the cabinet to block light. Using fabric allows me to get to the light easily, by simply moving this "curtain."

 

Coin Door

A real arcade machine primarily exists to make money, which means collecting coins from players. I really wanted my machine to have that authentic feel, so I decided to purchase and install a coin door with working coin mechanisms. This means that my cabinet actually accepts quarters for play, even though there's a "coin button" that tells the game ROM to add credits. The image on the left below shows the coin door installed in the cabinet face. The image on the right shows that the buttons are lighted.

 

 

Speakers

One of the things that makes MAME so awesome is that it fully captures the classic games. One important aspect of that is the sound. Who can forget the Pacman theme or the "munching" sound that Pacman makes while chomping through the maze?

 

I purchased an inexpensive set of CreativeLabs powered speakers that came with two speakers and a small sub woofer. I screwed the sub woofer to the inside of the cabinet, but the speakers needed to be vented out of the cab for good sound. To this end, I installed two speaker grills below the marquee (in the "overhang" above the monitor) and put the speaker cones from the speaker set behind them. Once it was all wired up to the sound card on the PC, it was plenty loud and looked good.

 

On to the PC within.