Online Shoppers Blog - Become's Pocket Change

The gigantic hole I've been pouring my money into recently has been a home arcade cabinet. It's going to be awesome once my buddy and I finish it. (No, seriously, we will. This won't be like the time it took me a year to build three barstools.)

I'm so excited. I've got a box of buttons and joysticks poured out all over my bed right now. It's going to run all the games of my childhood, be they arcade, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis or Atari 2600. It's going to play mp3s (in fact, it has one giant red button whose sole purpose is to play Manfred Mann's version of Bob Dylan's The Mighty Quinn. Don't ask.) I think the biggest innovation is going to be something I'm shocked arcade machines don't have already: cupholders.

One of the hardest parts so far has been figuring out which software to use. All of the systems I mentioned above (plus zillions more) have their own emulators, but you need something to tie it together and make it easy to use, so that every time someone wants to play a game I don't have to get up off the couch and show them how. That's where a class of programs called front ends come into play. I spent hours and hours downloading and setting them up, configuring .ini files, and doing all kinds of stuff I thought I had left behind when Bill Gates promised we were done with DOS back in 1995. (Well, I was done with DOS before I started, being a Mac bigot from way back, but that's another post.)

I'm here to tell you that the best front end--far and away, not even close--is one called Maximus Arcade. Unlike most of the others, it's not free/open source, but it's worth every penny of the $25 it costs. It looks really really good, it's a (relative) breeze to configure, and (most importantly) it's simple to navigate once it's set up. The problem with most of this stuff is that it's designed by geeks for geeks, and not enough attention is paid to a graceful user interface that drunkards at a party can figure out.

Maximus Arcade definitely knows its audience.

Aram