We all know about my recent arcade kick. Well, I focused my attention on SNK’s NEO-GEO hardware. I’ve been collecting and collecting, and I have quite a bit of gear now. And great things are going to start happening soon.

There’s quite a bit of stuff, so I’m going to split this. More after the jump!

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So, back in September I talked about the Baka’cade project, and the controller I had made. I still haven’t gotten it into a real housing yet, and that sort of irks me… But I’ll get it sorted out eventually.

I’ve had a small surplus of money that’s been burning a hole in my paypal account, and I’ve been itching for something to do with it… I finally settled on taking the next step with the arcade project.

I revisited GroovyGameGear.com and picked up the parts needed for the 2P controls. As well as some T-Molding and other items. Only came to $43 shipped. One of the ‘other items’ was some custom made leaf switch units that are drop-in replacements for the standard microswitch package that is used in most arcade buttons. Leaf switches have a couple advantages such as less activation travel and reset travel, less resistance, no click, smooth operation, faster response times, etc. These things sound really cool, and they’re custom made by Ithaca Digital Visual Technologies (The name of the company behind GroovyGameGear), so I just had to try them out! I bought three of them, to replace the ‘punch’ row of my controller setup. (Since I use Ibuki, my most critical moves depend on the punch buttons!) If they’re all they’re cracked up to be, they’re definitely replacing everything except the player start buttons. (Wonder if I can use them on the joysticks…)

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So a couple weeks ago, I got the urge to play some good ol’ fighting games. Not just on my PS2 or something, mind you… Real arcade fighters. So I broke out MAME and got my hands on some ROMs… It was fun, but something was missing… I was playing them with a Dual-Shock2, which wasn’t really suited to the task.

I saw an arcade controller on Play-Asia a while back, and it got me thinking…

I mean, I know people have built their own upright cabinets to play MAME, and there’s plenty of commercial solutions out there… How much would it cost to build something like that? It turns out, not much. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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