Basically the most important thing in a MAME cabinet is, well, the MAME software. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and can emulate most every arcade game up until about 2005 or so. What is the point in having an arcade cabinet without being able to play any games, MAME solves this problem. MAME is easy enough to download and setup. Just venture over to mamedev.org and download the latest binaries, or source if you want to compile yourself, then extract. The MAME program by itself only runs from the command line, so you need a front-end to manage your games graphically, especially if your using a cabinet (you don’t want to have a keyboard instead of joysticks).

Read about all the different software I use in my MAME cabinet