Cocktail MAME?

[Casual Observer]

Hey guys perhaps you can give some advice. My new job has 3 arcade games: Asteroids, Space Invaders, and now Galaga. So I said where's the Ms. PAC MAN? This led to talking about MAME which he hadn't heard about. If he wanted a fully built MAME cab or cocktail what's the best way to find that?

Craigslist bay area has like one listing.

[Jizaboz]

It's sort of a matter of preference. A real Ms. Pac-man cocktail with original guts and artwork, etc like mine go from about 700-1000$

Pre-built MAME machines with LCD monitors (bleah) that look nice go for around 1000$ Those things are VERY common on Craigslist in my area for some reason. You may just need to search a little outside the bay area..

Another option you can go with is an ArPiCade. Basically find a cheap, used cabinet.. preferably with 8-way joysticks, 1-2 player buttons, and at least 3 action buttons per player. You may have to replace some janky buttons, but that's cool. Game doesn't matter.. you just want to see that it works and that the monitor doesn't flake out. Then you buy an ArPiCade kit for around 140-200$, remove the original game PCB, and slap the ArPiCade into the same PCB slot. Boom, MAME cabinet! Just be aware that Pac-Man was a "vertical mounted" game (monitor is side-ways compared to your TV at home) so unless you are cool with about 2 inch margins on each side of the graphics, you'll want to buy the pre-loaded SD card for the kit meant for vertical mounted games. A lot of shooters like Gunsmoke and 1942 used this orientation as well. A game like Popeye or NBA Jam is "horizontally mounted".

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think it's that cocktail that is going to be the issue - like Jiz said, you have a ton of options, but that cocktail feel might be tougher to get. Let me think about this for a bit.