I have this glorious dream that someday I will rent out a cheap room in Banbury place and turn it into the place to be for teens into old school video games.  My new PC is fast becoming a repository of the old school - most of it legitimately obtained.  So my thought is, if I could make some kind’ve a front end for all of this stuff - linked into the emulators I prefer etc.  Maybe I could have people pay $5 to keep the machine ‘running’.  If one person pays $5 the ‘arcade’ is open for an hour - to anyone who walks in. 

Basically a contrived donation mechanism.  I’ve also got a (currently unsatisfactory) dual arcade stick setup from X-arcade that I am replcing the buttons and joystick on (with the actual brand and parts used in the machines we played growing up).

As well, there are USB adapters and two controllers for both genesis and snes.  I have all my N64 cartridges slurped onto my computer as well. With a $150 broadband adapter I could start downloading my Dreamcast games onto my computer. With a <$30 DVD drive I could start copying my Wii games as well.

Anyways, it turns out that Game Maker is a pretty intuitive application builder for me.  MAke the UI in photoshop - turn all the buttons into sprites -make all the buttons link to batch files for each game.

It is awfully not user friendly though.  It’s an uphill grind to be productive with it.  There are too many clicks to do anything usefull. but once you get past the clicks everything is terrbly simple. It has a really good graphics engine as well.