I'll be the first to admit that I may have gone a little overboard in creating my arcade emulation cabinet. But given I started in the industry creating games in the 1980s, hung out in the arcades, owned and repaired arcade machines and, later, went into video engineering - maybe it's not that crazy. Plus, at the time I made this cabinet I still had several original arcade cabinets but needed to make room in my basement arcade for more pinball machines. So I decided to see if I could make "One cabinet to replace them all." And I got sufficiently close.
When my cabinet was new I played it almost daily for the first year. Now I play it at least once or twice a week but I've had the cabinet for nearly 15 years (and have upgraded the PC and front-end a couple times). However, there are still periods were I play it almost daily. These tend to happen either when I get into deep diving a genre (for example, Japanese shmups) or when there's a significant new title enabled (or fixed) in MAME or another emulator that I find especially interesting.
An example would be when the unreleased Atari game Marble Madness II was added to MAME. This was an extremely rare unreleased ROM which was unfortunately hoarded by a couple of collectors for many years and considered 'at-risk' from a historical preservation perspective. Once the game ROM finally found it's way to being safely archived online, MAME added support for it. To be clear, Marble Madness II was unreleased for good reason (the reason being it sucked). But I love the first Marble Madness and it's a historically significant, influential title (with an awesome soundtrack) so diving into its (wisely) aborted descendant was fascinating. It is, indeed, not at all a good game. What was interesting was exploring the ways it's not good, and most importantly - why. After all, it's based on a now-legendary mega-hit game with an innovative play style and distinctive visuals. That should be pretty hard to screw up. As you might guess, none of the original Marble Madness team were involved in MMII. But, clearly the MMII team played a ton of the original, yet they somehow managed to misunderstand what made it so great.
Other times, I'll boot up the cabinet because some classic game I never really got into will be featured on a retro-gaming blog or YT channel and that'll pique my interest in exploring the title as well as its precursors and descendants. That's why it's handy to have the full game libraries of every arcade cabinet title, a couple dozen 80s home computers and every game from every home console from the first generation (Atari VCS - 1977) to the sixth generation (Sony PS2/Gamecube - 2001) all browsable by platform, year, manufacturer, play style, genre and rating. When I come across some reference to a game on the Japanese Sharp X68000 computer being a derivative of an earlier game on the Amiga 1000, and both being inspired by a 1982 arcade title - I can play them all back-to-back and compare. I doubt I'll ever not love being able to conveniently play any classic retro-game in a full cabinet with top notch controls, pixel/frame accuracy and maximum fidelity.
When my cabinet was new I played it almost daily for the first year. Now I play it at least once or twice a week but I've had the cabinet for nearly 15 years (and have upgraded the PC and front-end a couple times). However, there are still periods were I play it almost daily. These tend to happen either when I get into deep diving a genre (for example, Japanese shmups) or when there's a significant new title enabled (or fixed) in MAME or another emulator that I find especially interesting.
An example would be when the unreleased Atari game Marble Madness II was added to MAME. This was an extremely rare unreleased ROM which was unfortunately hoarded by a couple of collectors for many years and considered 'at-risk' from a historical preservation perspective. Once the game ROM finally found it's way to being safely archived online, MAME added support for it. To be clear, Marble Madness II was unreleased for good reason (the reason being it sucked). But I love the first Marble Madness and it's a historically significant, influential title (with an awesome soundtrack) so diving into its (wisely) aborted descendant was fascinating. It is, indeed, not at all a good game. What was interesting was exploring the ways it's not good, and most importantly - why. After all, it's based on a now-legendary mega-hit game with an innovative play style and distinctive visuals. That should be pretty hard to screw up. As you might guess, none of the original Marble Madness team were involved in MMII. But, clearly the MMII team played a ton of the original, yet they somehow managed to misunderstand what made it so great.
Other times, I'll boot up the cabinet because some classic game I never really got into will be featured on a retro-gaming blog or YT channel and that'll pique my interest in exploring the title as well as its precursors and descendants. That's why it's handy to have the full game libraries of every arcade cabinet title, a couple dozen 80s home computers and every game from every home console from the first generation (Atari VCS - 1977) to the sixth generation (Sony PS2/Gamecube - 2001) all browsable by platform, year, manufacturer, play style, genre and rating. When I come across some reference to a game on the Japanese Sharp X68000 computer being a derivative of an earlier game on the Amiga 1000, and both being inspired by a 1982 arcade title - I can play them all back-to-back and compare. I doubt I'll ever not love being able to conveniently play any classic retro-game in a full cabinet with top notch controls, pixel/frame accuracy and maximum fidelity.