Arcade Machine Project

After researching for quite a while on the internet i found the following options for which to build a base for my arcade machine to play the original game/s onto.

     Option 1                                                         

Original PCB Board
What better way to Start than to find the original PCB Board in the arcade machine (in my case Space invaders).

It turns out as you can see from above they are extermely rare to find anymore and can be extortionate prices. Looking how to wire them up also isnt't as simple as this wire goes here and here, diagrams need to be ordered and worked out and soldered and crimped just like the orginal else it simply wont work. There is also no guarantee that the board will work due to their age.
Truely think this option is out of the window

     Option 2                                                         

Atari 2600

Made infamous as being one of the first home video enterainment systems the release of space invaders was made onto the atari platform quickly after release.
There are differences between the original and the atari version as you can see below.

                                  Original Arcade Game                    Atari 2600 Version

As you can see there is quite a difference between the two versions and i can notably tell and therfore i think would not have the same experience.

The other task with this option is to rewire the controllers and configure them into other buttons.

Shown above is the standard atari controller. Rewiring this would give me only 1 joystick with 4 way x and y axis control and 3 other usable buttons, not really the number that i would ultimately want.

I will also have to buy the game cartridge as this is required to play the game.

Atari 2600 Game Program

     Option 3                                                         

MAME Computer emulator

This option i think is the best by far as you can play multiple games on the program and use a standard computer running windows xp as the base. This is a cheap start and the program is completely free to use.

Below is a screenshot of the program being used.

It uses emulation to recreate the programming used for the machines to run original roms of the games. It can be configured to use a keyboard and mouse, gamepad or usb interface.
There is whole community websites online dedicated to mame and creations that people produce.

For these reasons that is why this would be my option to use.