The 80's was a decade that many of us remember for its classic arcade games and a place to hang out with friends and spend time on the arcade games. In the mid 90's most these classics have disappeared and its becoming rare to find a playable machine. Slot machines are almost the only amusement games we discover in public places.

However for some of you the old arcades are still with us, the good news is these games are still playable. With the help of the MAME arcade emulator, we can play the large variety of arcade games on our PC computers. The gameplay is near perfect emulated as the datas are extracted from the original arcade motherboards. You can see now, MAME has preserved a part of history for us where we can load up our favorite arcade titles. Its great we can still enjoy these games but I'm sure many of you agree, its not exactly the same thrill as gaming in front of a real arcade.

However playing on a MAME cabinet is much more authentic and similar to real arcade machines. As the games already are very authentic with MAME cabinets, you also see all the other elements, like t-molding, arcade controls and coindoors. Using keyboard or mouse on a MAME cabinet can be a bit of a struggle, that's the reason why people use Frontends, since its easier to use the arcade joysticks and push buttons. A Frontend can launch other emulators and games, for instance Atari or Nintendo. There are even ways to completely hide the Windows installation and its desktop.

The task of finding arcade parts is quite easy as these are purchasable all over the internet, so don't worry about that. As for the display you could use a PC monitor, a more authentic option would be to use graphic cards s-video output and wire it to a TV. To play the games at their native resolution you would need an Arcade monitor. For those located in Europe there is another option as we can use CRT Scart TV's together with an ArcadeVGA card to display the games native low resolution, like the real arcade machines.

Still no matter what, there is always the MAME emulator where everyone can load up all the best Arcades like old days.