My name is Ed Farias, and I am owner of Arcade-In-A-Box, LLC. We have been building arcade consoles for a few years now, but are just now starting to get out and market our product. All of our sales in the past have been from word of mouth, and a few well placed links. Our new site is finally up, just finishing up last minute touches with the new online store before that part goes live. I hope the information below will give you a good idea of what are target audience is with these games. We hope by offering a low cost solution for developers to sell their software will entice them to alter their arcade games in a way that will work with the home arcade market. I apologize for the canned paste below, but I have been visiting many websites today, and that is a lot to type :). Here is a link to the Tech Doc for the Arcade-in-a-Box units, but the key inputs are pretty standard for most home arcade cabinets. Arcade-In-A-Box Technical Specs If you have any questions I'll try to check this thread regularly over the next few days. Otherwise, feel free to email us using the contact page at www.aiabgames.com --------------------- Arcade-In-A-Box Game's website is now live for developers to start registering. www.aiabgames.com (If you want to see a demo of the dev portal, just log in as ArcadEd/reztro) (If you want to see the store click here, it's just not live yet, but there are few demo products to show) Here is a copy and paste of our current FAQ, hopefully it will answer some questions. If not, I'll be checking back here very often to help address any questions. What is AIAB Games? AIAB Games is a division of Arcade-In-A-Box, LLC. We are dedicated to finding talented independent game developers that have a desire to create arcade style games, and give them an outlet to sell their games. Our sole business is not to make profits off selling software. Our main business is manufacturing high quality arcade controllers and consoles. However, we do see opportunity to utilize these great games to help sell our units, while promoting your games in return. It?s a win both sides. What do I need to do to make my games available at AIAB Games? First, you will want to download the AIAB Technical Specifications Sheet. This document will give you a good idea of how to program games for this platform. If it is something you are interested in, then register for an account here. There are no setup fees, so registration is free. Once you have registered you can then login to the developer area. From there you can add games to the database, edit games, view stats, etc. What does AIAB Game get out of this? AIAB Games takes a 12% percent commission from each sale (10% +2% for credit card processing if a credit card is used.). The rest of the money you sell the game for is yours. The only exception to that is if you want to be paid via paypal, there is a small funds transfer fee. We make payments the 1st of every month. What is the process of adding a game? Once you have a final version of your game, login to your AIAB Games account to get to the Developer Portal. From their you will click the add game button and fill out the information. Once that is complete, you will get an email with the information to an ftp site to upload your game too. At this point, AIAB will test the game on an arcade system to make sure 1. It?s compatible and 2. There are no game killing bugs. Once 1 and 2 are cleared, the game is packaged in 3 ways. 1. Arcade Cabinet (MAME Compliant), 2. Arcade-In-A-Box, and 3. PC Compliant. Then it?s added to the store for download. How good does my game have to be? Over the years of playing video games, we have learned one thing; everyone has a different taste in what is fun. With that said, we will not judge your game. As long as it meets the technical requirements and is not buggy, it will be added to the store. Now whether it sells may determine how good it is. But, it won?t cost you anything to have it in our store. However, we do reserve the rights to remove any game from the store that is not selling if we become short of space Are your Arcade-In-A-Box units the only thing my games would be playable on? No. There are thousands of home arcade setups out there. People build or purchase their arcade cabinets to play MAME (tm). What we are asking developers to do is simply recode their games slightly to use the same basic MAME(tm) key inputs. Any MAME(tm) compatible cabinet can now play your games as well. ---End FAQ--- After registering you will have access to the Developer Portal. Hopefully we can build a nice downloads section to help other developers with their projects. I hope to open the store May 1st, but if we have enough games before then I'll open it earlier. It would be great to have at least 5 games available when the store opens. Thanks again for all the hard work you put into your games. [Edited by - ArcadEd on March 31, 2006 8:53:47 AM]

You might wanna post in the correct forum?

Quote: Original post by SymLinked
You might wanna post in the correct forum?

Hmm, I thought I was :).

Which forum would be better? Help me out here :).

i think it should go in the 'your announcements' forum or 'help wanted'. but, good initiative.
just a question: only the resolution is a requirement, not the language? it can be any language around as long as it runs on xp?

Thanks, If a mod could move this thread to a more appropriate place, please do so.

As for the language question. That doesn't matter to me. My site and store will be in english, for now. But I see no problem with having your game in another language if you want. :)

Oh i'm sorry- i ment programming language. Sorry i was not clear on that point. Well i guess that any development language will do. Anyway, good luck!

Quote: Original post by Marmin
Oh i'm sorry- i ment programming language. Sorry i was not clear on that point. Well i guess that any development language will do. Anyway, good luck!

Oh, duh! LOL

Yes, any programming language is fine. We will be using InnoSetup to package the the games, so you can even provide a full install if you need to, we can make it work with InnoSetup.

I couldn`t find any details regarding the graphics card chipset. It says there is 32 MB and the bus is PCI. But what performance can I expect from it ? Is it some custom chipset or some regular GeForce ? It`s necessary to know because if it`s some older DX7-level card, it won`t run our games that are all in 3D with relatively high amount of polygons on screen.

Vlad, the spec sheet gives a bit more detail,

But here is a direct link to the same card I use in the boxes by default.
XFX GEFORCE FX 5200 256MB PCI 8X DDR W/DVI & TV OUT
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=3491015

I do want to stress though, my boxes are not going to be the only market for these games. There are tons of home built arcade cabinets and arcade controllers out there. These people have various PC setups. I would suggest programming the game like you would for any normal PC game. That's just my opinion because the specs on my box are pretty high considering what most in the home arcade market have.

Thanks for the interest.

Hm, I must have downloaded something different then, since that spec sheet didn`t include detailed info on gfx card. I`ll redownload all files again.

Geforce 5200 has definitely high rendering power. But why on earth have you considered PCi bus ? This cripples the card to less than half of real speed of AGP version. Is there some hardware reason for this ? Price surely isn`t because the better performance can be had from any older and cheaper AGP card (like GF4Ti4200 on AGP).

So, each game should have some sort of options to set the detail level to accommodate for different performance configurations, right ?

BTW, what kind of configuration (CPU,GFX) could be considered as average at this moment ?