I also didn't add custom joysticks or buttons. I found a old bowling game that was non-functional from a local ad and picked that up for $100. I went the more traditional route but I didn't build my own arcade cabinet. Or, you can go for a more traditional experience and build a real arcade cabinet to house the computer and attach custom arcade quality joysticks and buttons for your inputs. You can just run the emulator on your current Mac and use a keyboard and trackpad as your input devices and be done with it.

When building a M.A.M.E arcade cabinet you can be as authentic to a true arcade cabinet as you desire. Since I was already using an old Apple Cinema Display as the monitor, I figured I'd make the cabinet a complete Apple affair with with my LED Cinema Display, my 2014 Mac mini, and my full sized Apple keyboard (a third-party trackball doubles as a mouse so that was not needed). I had built up so much software cruft over the years that the system started to become quirky rather than useful in it's function. It worked very well but it was unwieldy, loud, overly wired, and frankly just old. I previously had the traditional M.A.M.E.

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