Emulation

I first became interested in emulation when I was trying to get my wife interested in computers. She frankly did not understand their appeal, and was not understanding of the amount of time I spent in front of my machine. She had mentioned one game that she really liked was Populous for the Sega Genesis. I searched the Internet for this game and discovered emulators and ROMs.

Soon I had a somewhat sizable collection and was happily playing childhood favorites with a gravis gamepad that looked a lot like a Super Nes pad. I moved from Sega Genesis games to Super NES and even started finding NeoGeo games. These were my absolute favorite games in the arcades. I collected the majority of available NeoGeo games, which I played with NeoRage. I also dabbled in Playstation Emulation with Bleem! and later Expse.
In this early time I did stumble across an early copy of MAME, but I was put off by the lack of a GUI and the fact that I had to compile it myself. While waiting for an online realator to RMA my Geforce 3, I rediscovered MAME. I also stumbled across the BYOC forums. I read the entire site, and followed every link to the many examples out that members had submitted. The more I read, the more it became evident that I wanted, no I needed to build me an arcade cabinet or at least a controller.

I started figuring out what it would take to build first a controller, then on to a cabinet. My wife put her foot down against the cabinet, but she actively supported the controller project.