Posted by Android on 5, 2001 at 6:07 PM:
In Reply to: Re: What is a MAME Cabinet worth? posted by paige on 5, 2001 at 5:16 AM:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you think hard about it, the potential market for your handmade cabinet is pretty small:
1. Arcade collectors buy originals and are not interested in Mame/hand-made/generic cabinets
2. Arcade operators want to make a profit out of their investment and wouldn't imagine them running Mame in their businesses
3. Arcade enthusiasts either:
a) Build their own for less than that
b) Build cabinets made by arcade manufacturers (Hanaho) at similar prices
b) Buy orignal/generic, non-working cabinets for less than that
c) Comission the construction of their cabinet to more experienced enthusiasts
So that leaves you with a potential market of Mame enthusiasts that either want arcade-quality cabinets (you will be competing with Hanaho) or Mame enthusiasts that want a custom-built cabinet.
Unfortunately, due to the laws of offer/demand, you can not always recover your investment. When demand is small, you won't even recover the cost of the materials, let alone the time you invested on the project. Unless you offer similar quality at competitive prices or you offer features that are well worth the difference from your competitor's price tags, I don't see a huge market other than build-upon-request (see what happened to Arcade2000 and others).
But of course I may be wrong. Feel free to comment
: What I was thinking is something like this.
: Make MAME cabinet for about $600
: (Empty cabinet $25, Monitor $200, Computer $200, Controls $125, Odds and ends $50). Sell MAME cabinet for about $1000?
: That would allow me to buy a semi nice dedicated Game and build another MAME cabinet in time for the next arcade auction.
: I am basing the computer cost on the asumption of being kind of stripped down, (basically an all in one motherboard, processor, Ram, and hard drive).
: To be legal on the operating system end I could either use Freedos, Linux, or one of the stack of Win95 OEM CDs that I have. (Does MAME run on Fredos?)