Welcome to the site!

This site was created to display our first arcade cabinet - "The Heavy Metal Arcade". My friend Bruce and I wanted to build a couple of arcade cabinets after reading about folks building homemade Mame Cabs. I started working on the cabinets over Spring Break 2004 (working at a University has it's perks) and Bruce would come over on the weekends so we could work as a team. Originally, I thought about making two identical cabinets based on the Heavy Metal theme - but the cabinet idea was so original that I decided that there should be only one.

Thanks for checking out the site,
Chris Newsome
- to keep down SPAM, my email address is a graphic

What is an arcade cabinet?

If you were growing up during the 80s and you haven't heard of game emulation, you need to grab a seat and take a deep breath because you are about to hear about something that will rock your world - and possibly cause you to spend excessive amounts of money to regain years of misspent youth.

Imagine having over 3,000 arcade games - PLUS every Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega, Sega Genesis and Atari game at your fingertips... Not only that, it's a fully functional Juke Box and milkshake dispenser! Well - ok, forget the milkshakes - but this thing is an entire gameroom in one package.

Emulation software will allow your PC to emulate the original game hardware - this makes it possible to play versions of the original games stored in a format called ROMs.

Links you need to check out:

Why "Heavy Metal" as an arcade cabinet theme?

Chris' reason:
"Somewhere around 1981-82, I had an Atari 2600 and I lived just a few miles from several video game arcades. I also had access to HBO on cable TV and on one particular Saturday night I caught a showing of "Heavy Metal". Being only 8 years old at the time - this movie scared the crap out of me. This is when it all started..." (I could go on forever, but you wouldn't want to read it).

Bruce's reason:
"I thought it'd look cool."

Being huge fans of Heavy Metal music and all things "80s", the "Heavy Metal Arcade Cabinet" was an easy choice... it was either that or a KISS themed cabinet. The KISS idea was dropped after Gene Simmons demanded all quarters dropped into the coin slot.