MYWAY

Not long after we discovered videogame emulators, my brother and I discovered MAME the “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator” and we were mesmerised. You could play all your arcade favourites on your home PC (if you own or have rights to the roms you wish to use). Soon we were talking about how cool it would be to have a PC in a cabinet which looked like an arcade machine and run MAME on it to play games.

Neither of us did much about it for several years, until I had my own house, and a garage full of diy tools. One day someone I knew was getting rid of some MDF and it was the right size to build an arcade cabinet. I took the MDF, and started marking out a design for building a cabinet. Please note I am very poor at woodwork, so this was a real challenge but I cut out the design I’d drawn using a jigsaw.

Then I made some shelves to hold the PC which would run the project, and the monitor and speakers to add sound and vision. Then screwed the parts together.

I filled in the front, and put in a perspex screen cover. The screen was darkened with some black card with a hole cut out the size of the monitor screen. The buttons and joystick came from an arcade cabinet supply specialist online but were very reasonably priced, and made the cabinet look authentic. They are connected by a USB interface card which is designed for this purpose. They can also be used to control the interface by emulating keyboard functions.

The next pictures show the finished MAME arcade cabinet in use. It’s running a 1ghz AMD Athlon processor, with 512MB memory and an nvidia graphics card. All outdated equipment put in an old case, and running Windows XP and MAME of course.

This picture shows my wife playing on the MAME arcade machine…

Here is one which shows the buttons better…

That’s my MAME Arcade Machine Classicade.

Many years ago a few friends and family got together in the snow. When our friends and family get together things get a bit silly. It started with a home made sledge and a 4×4 vehicle in the snow. Add in some rope and you have fun with a capital F.

Then someone remembered we had a parachute which had appeared from somewhere a long time before. Paragliding seemed like a good idea, even though we didn’t know if the parachute was right, or anything about paragliding behind a car. So what we tried anyway….

There are other videos to come in the snowy day series. Just as soon as we digitize them from the old VHS format

These Japanese commuters really know how sardines feel inside the tin. But you have to feel sorry for them when even the guards get involved in the fun. Watch and see how to make the most of every bit of space on the carriage.

Once again I am forwarding from http://www.funforever.net one of their finds. These wind powered lights from Firewinder make beautiful patterns as they turn and flash. Here is a quick video of them in action.

As I sometimes do, I was browsing http://www.funforever.net which has some terrific posts on it. Spookily this week we had been making a cake for my daughters 5th birthday, and one of the latest posts on forever.net showed some incredible cake “sculptures” Including the following examples….

A laptop cake for the pc lover in your life.

This one is ideal for the old time music lover. Just look at the tremendous detail in that iced confection, sweet music to the tastebuds and the eyes.

You can gamble on this being a tasty treat too, the odds are in your favour here.

23 Red is the winning number, on more gambling inspired delights.

For more of these delightfully different cakes take a peek at http://www.funforever.net/archives/fancy-cakes/ where there are loads of examples of the bakers artistry.

We’ve all had a go at making balloon animals (usually a crappy looking sausage dog) or if not at least seen an “entertainer” making balloon giraffes, dogs and swans. My daughter even won a balloon interpretation of Wile e Coyotes nemesis and preferred meal the Roadrunner. But they don’t even come close to the collection of balloon sculptures showing at funforever.net.
It includes a fairground, and many recognisable characters made from balloons. Go take a look, they are great if somewhat poppable works of art.

I don’t know where he finds them, but my dad seems to find some real fun and silly stuff on his travels. Then of course it has to be tried out. The latest was this hot air balloon “toy” which should inflate and rise using a hair dryer which my daughter kindly loaned us (until it broke). Here are some short clips of us attempting to launch the hot air balloon.

Then we had hot air balloon attempt number 2 with the hair dryer repaired…

I just love the way they’ve played with this classic cutesy cartoon and turned it into something with attitude. Listen to the lyrics closely they’re classic too.