T3 (that’s me) and Notorious BFG (my buddy). We were young in the 80’s and 90’s when the Arcade was king. We both spent more hours than we could ever account for and several small fortunes in quarters playing the great early arcade games. Times changed, we got older, got married, had kids, got busy, and forgot. Forgot the thrill of standing at a game cab for hours trying to beat your (or someone else’s) high score. Forgot how satisfying it is to play the old games on old school machines.

So I thought it would be cool to have an arcade machine. My all time fav was Tempest so I started looking around for a Tempest machine and got schooled really quickly on how expensive, unreliable, hard to repair, and generally problematic they were. Disallusioned, I let the dream slip into the background. Then one day I was over at BFG’s and saw the MAME that he had in the basement. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Basically it is an arcade cabinet (cab) that has old style controls and a monitor, but inside it is a PC with software that emulates the old hardware used to run the old arcade games. You can have 100’s or even 1000’s of games on a single machine. BFG’s had Tempest!

My dream was reignited and when BFG offered to help build and pay for a MAME for my 45th birthday the spark was fanned into a roaring fire that is threatening to consume everything in it’s path. (did I mention that I am a little bit obsessive about things?) So, the Cowboy Arcade Project was born. We will be detailing the design, build and testing of the Cowboy Arcade on this blog if anyone is interested.