If you’re looking for a JAMMA cabinet originally constructed in the States—the larger, stand-up, heavy arcade cabinets, generally made of wood, that you’ll see in your local game room or bar—then you have a few choices. Go on eBay, find a live auction, or talk to your local arcade operator.

Because eBay has a Location/International option in its advanced search that will find items local to you, you can search for arcade cabinets in your area. Be aware that shipping cabinets can be as or more expensive than the cabinet itself—even brief freight trips to you, the lucky buyer, can cost over $300. If you can manage it, try to buy a cabinet you can pick up yourself.

You may need to do some detective work to see if the cabinet in that perfect eBay auction supports JAMMA. Search for information on the game currently working in the cabinet with KLOV (http://www.klov.com/index.php). Many cabinets that include games won’t have the phrase “JAMMA compatible” in their listings, even though they actually are.

Make a note of the button configuration, too. The basic JAMMA setup supports two players with three buttons per player as well as a Start button. If the cabinet you’re bidding on has fewer buttons, you may have trouble playing standard JAMMA games without modifying your control panel.

As for auctions, Super Auctions (http://www.superauctions.com/, shown in Figure 5-7) is probably the most famous regular arcade game auctioneer in the United States. It holds multiple yearly auctions across the country. Prices range from a hundred to over a thousand dollars, depending on the size and quality of the cabinet and the ferocity of the bidding.

Figure 5-7. Super Auctions, the only major U.S. arcade auctioneers

Finally, it might be worth going into your local (perhaps slightly run-down) arcade to see if there are any old cabinets the owner might sell cheaply. Unfortunately, given the upkeep of a lot of these establishments, you may not find a perfectly preserved artifact, but it’s better than nothing.

Although the mid- and late-’90s Japanese arcade cabinets that made their way to the States have the same basic design and no region lockouts, they have quite a different style and form factor than American cabinets. To start with, they’re generally made of metal and are much shorter, so players sit, not stand, at them. They also have larger monitors—at least 25 inches diagonally—and have generic, good-looking decals on the sides that should suit almost any game you put in them. If you can deal with sitting down to play and sometimes being uncomfortably close to your fellow player when dueling in two-player combat due to the smaller size, then Japanese cabinets are the stylish, cool-looking choice for the JAMMA acolyte in a hurry. Remember, you can play American games in Japanese cabinets and vice versa.

Finding Japanese cabinets is a little trickier than old American cabinets, though. The vast majority of these cabinets enter the United States via container ships steaming into Los Angeles. You’ll always find at least one seller on eBay selling generic Japanese JAMMA cabinets. Prices start at around $250 for 25-inch monitor models and can reach $700 or more for deluxe 29-inch versions. These cabinets are actually branded around specific arcade game manufacturers, but will work for all JAMMA titles nonetheless.

Some common Japanese cabinet brands turning up in the States include the Sega Aero City and Astro City, the quirky but excellent-looking Taito Egret, and a variety of SNK Candy cabinets that come ready with the extra JAMMA connections to play Neo Geo games. Most of these cabinets sell without any included games, incidentally. Unlike the majority of U.S. arcade cabinets, which started life with a specific game inside, Japanese cabinets are completely generic by design.

The biggest problem with buying Japanese cabinets is probably location, location, location. Unless you live close to Los Angeles, you’ll probably spend $300 to $500 just to ship the cabinet to your house. The problem is similar to that of buying nonlocal American cabinets, which means that the relatively competitive pricing on these Japanese-imported cabinets becomes uncompetitive pretty quickly. Many collectors think the extra shipping is still worth it to pick up good-looking, versatile Japanese cabinets, though.

Cabinet building is an extremely complex topic all on its own, admirably covered in another O’Reilly Hacks title, Hardware Hacking Projects For Geeks, which you should check out at your leisure. Suffice to say that many cabinet-building projects don’t include JAMMA connections; they are set up for the player to simply put a PC and a normal computer monitor into the cabinet and pretend like it’s a real arcade machine. I call that cheating, but your mileage, naturally, may vary.

Anyhow, if you want to build a cabinet and then build JAMMA connections into it, the ArcadeRestorations.com site has a good explanation of how to go from an empty cabinet to a JAMMA cabinet (http://www.arcaderestoration.com/index.asp?OPT=3&DATA=63&CBT=24). This page explains the full, if complex, wiring setup you’ll need.

Safety is really important, even if you’re just buying an already constructed video game cabinet, so bear in mind that you shouldn’t interfere with the innards of the machine while it’s turned on. Make sure the machine is properly electrically grounded (many Japanese machines are not, as they use two-pronged plugs only), and especially avoid the back of the monitor, even when the machine is off. In most arcade machines, if you have the keys to open the cabinet and are dumb enough to wiggle your hands into the dangerous parts around the back of the monitor, there’s enough voltage to kill you.

Be careful, and by all means touch the adjustment knobs often situated around the back of the arcade monitor, but try not to expire in the name of playing arcade-perfect Street Fighter II.