Oh my, this does look nice. Frederic Sebton has taken an old PowerBook and an IKEA side table (Ramvik is the model) and turned it into an arcade cabinet.

Sebton has basically taken a PowerBook apart and mounted the screen and computer guts back-to-back, with the screen showing up through a hole cut in the top of the table. He then used a piece of black cardboard and a piece of glass as the top-most layer, mounted an arcade style joystick in the cabinet’s drawer, and ka-boom: a nice arcade cabinet running Mame software on a PowerBook.

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I’ll tinker with my X-Arcade once a week, but certainly not as much as I thought I would. I like playing Golden Tee, but setting it up on my TV is a pain. If only my coffee table had Pac Man readily available. Eric certainly knows what I’m talking about and his Ikea MAME table is fantastic. It plays Ms. Pac Man, but that’s besides the point. It’s even better because it doubles as a dinner table or what have you. Pull the leaves apart and the MAME is revealed. It has a 15-inch LCD and Happ Controls wired to an Ultimate I-Pac. Pretty sweet, huh?

Flickr [via BB]

Maybe I should get one of those shady payday advances for this. “This” being the Gamerator, a full-sized MAME cabinet that just so happens to have a built-in refrigerator. And what else would you store in the refrigerator other than beer? Well, food, yeah, but that’s boring. There’s a small tap in the front whence beer flows into your might ROM chalice.

I mention payday advances because the Gamerator is eBay right now for $2,000. Should you place the winning bid, you’ll get the machine proper as well as 187 “licensed” games. Real games, too, like Street Fighter and not its cheap, east-of-the-Iron-Curtain knockoff Street Fighter/Spirit Crusher.

Gamerator Auction [eBay via Boing Boing Gadgets]

There was a time in college that I wanted to buy a Golden Tee arcade machine because…well…it’s just about the coolest game ever. I also hated going to Clodfelters and paying up to $20 to play the damn thing when I was getting crunk. So my roommates and I had it all planned out. We were going to get one off of eBay and to recoup our costs we’d hold tournaments and leave it coin-operated for everyone to use. It was a brilliant plan, but no one wanted to front the money for it. We were, after all, poor college students who spent money on booze, bud, and boobies. But don’t get me wrong. I enjoy playing other arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Pac Man, but Golden Tee was the bomb and something I was good at.

So you can imagine the tingling sensation I felt in my pants when the X-Arcade Tankstick arrived at my doorstep. I knew exactly what I wanted to play the moment I unboxed it. Even now I won’t play anything other than Golden Tee. Even though I can purchase adapters for use on any game console, I still haven’t done so, but maybe you will. In case you didn’t know X-Arcade is a gawd among retro-arcade enthusiasts. The level of accuracy the sticks and trackball provide are phenomenal. Not to mention the fact that combo moves are way easier on an arcade machine than any game console controller. But the fact that I can play thousands of classic arcade games has me tickled pink. There are also four pinball flipper buttons in case you’re into that sort of thing.
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The MAME guys cracked Capcom’s CPS III encryption about a week ago and have made a startling amount of progress since then. (In fact, I just grabbed a bunch of CPS III dumps from Usenet in preparation for the moment when a Mac OS X port is released.) CPS III was the hardware that all 600 versions of Street Fighter III ran on but wasn’t compatible with the MAME emulator until last week. You’ll find no ROM links here, but when the CPS III-compatible MAME hits, you can bet I’ll be taking a sick day. Sorry, John.

And who knows, maybe someone will resurrect the Xbox 1 MAME port now.

Keep Your Eyes Here [Speksnk.org via Xbox-Scene]

Arcade In A Box [Product Page, via Oh, Gizmo!]