Arcade Cabinet Project

Control Panel and Trim done!

2006-08-23T23:40:00.000-07:00

I let the pics do the talking...

The cabinet with the red T-Molding

Finished Control Panel

The wiring inside the Control Panel. I have no idea about how to mount the monitor I want, so once I figure that out I'll post it.

It's been a while...

2006-08-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

Between a new job, school starting, and the house getting robbed, I haven't really been too focused on the Cabinet as I would like. Well, here's an update:

Mamewah is the front end I decided on, but I didn't like the fact that you had to create custom lists on your own, so here is a script that I created that takes the XML from Mame and the Catver.ini and creates a Custom list for each category that is in the Catver.ini. This is set up so that you should be able to run this anytime a new version of Mame comes out. If your Catver.ini is older than your copy of Mame, it will put those games not found in a separate custom list called "No Category". Also, all Mature Games are filtered out into the Mature Custom List before anything else is filtered. Here's how to run it:

1) Install PHP from http://www.php.net (PHP has a command line interface, so you don't need to have anything else running);
2) Add c:\php to your path (path=%path%;c:\php;);
3) Run "mame -listxml > list.xml";
4) Put both list.xml and Catver.ini in the same directory as listcreator.php
5) Run "php listcreator.php";
6) Copy the files over your Mamewah install.

You can download the script here.

I'll post some pics next.

Coin Doors (cont)...

2006-08-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

So I sanded down the coin doors and the front and painted them. I got a can of rustoleum textured black spray paint for the doors. Here's the results:

Apparently a drop of paint landed on the bottom door (you can see it in the bottom middle):

I didn't like how that looked so I sanded the door down and painted it again.

Here's pics of the front. The area around where the doors go is indented. You won't see that line once the doors are mounted.

All in all I'm much happier with how these doors look now then how they looked before. I have to thank RetroBlast and their article, and also the guys on BYOAC forums for the help and advice.

Coin Doors

2006-08-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

It turns out that the coin doors are easily removed from the cabinet. If only I tried removing them before I painted. Oh well. It looks like I'm sanding the front down again , along with the coin doors, then painting both of them. If I'm doing this thing, I might as well do it right.

The front. I decided to fill in the holes as well, since they were unneeded.

Here's the counter. I doubt I'm going to be hooking this up. I can't see a reason to.

Painting...

2006-07-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

Over the next few days I painted about three coats of black semi-gloss on the sides and the front of the cabinet. After the cabinet was dried Andy and I brought it back into the house. Here's the pics of the finished paint job:

As you can see, the tape that I surrounded the Coin Door with kind of became part of the cabinet. I guess that's because of the heat out here. I'm going to go around with some touch-up paint and fix that.

Priming and Drilling...

2006-07-27T20:19:00.000-07:00

Here's some pics of the the cabinet all primed up:

Once that was done I drilled the holes in the wood part of the CP. Here's a pic:

Then I used a router with a straight bit to drill out the hole for the trackball in the wood and the plexiglass. I used a pattern/flush bit for the rest of the buttons in the plexi. Here's the pic of the plexi:

On to the next day...

Planning and sanding...

2006-07-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been meaning to update this, I've just been busy. So I'll just set the dates for this post as the day I did this, and we'll all pretend that I posted it that day. Ok, before I started sanding, I removed the laminate stickers that were covering the old artwork. Clearly this was a NBA Jam cabinet. I mean, I knew it was, but there's no hiding it now.

I can just hear the announcer going "He's on fire!"

After this was all done, I decided on the layout of the CP. My first layout looked like this:

..but shardian from the BYOAC boards noticed that the joysticks weren't lined up correctly. Seems I measured from the wrong line. Anyway, I fixed that and came up with this:

I liked how this was looking, so I went with it. On to the next day...

Big day

2006-07-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Here's the cabinet I picked up today. I was very happy to find out that it has a coin door. Too bad the monitor mounts won't fit a 27" monitor. Well, here's the pics:

The front:

The back:

The side:

Inside:

It looks like it was an old NBA Jam cabinet:

The monitor mounts:
(Imageshack seemed to mess up this pic, so I'm taking this down for now.)

The front of the coin door:

The Bottom coin door:

The control panel housing (there is no top):

Inside the coin doors:

There seems to be a counter inside the bottom coin door (not sure about it):

And there's even a coin bucket!

Day One

2006-07-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

God I hate computers. I was planning on using the parts from my old computer to be the brains of my cabinet. But of course something was wrong with them. The motherboard seemed to have fried at some point, which is odd seeing that it hasn't been used in about a year. Also, the case I picked up for dirt cheap was nowhere near close to the ATX form. That's what I get for dumpster diving. So I drive over to Fry's to get a new case and motherboard. It seems that they don't sell Socket A motherboards anymore.

(A quick note: Fuck computer manufacturers, and I mean manufacturers of every part that you have to buy. I bought this CPU exactly two years ago and that's so old that I can't even get a replacement board at the store? It works fine! Fuck you for even considering two years for something to be obsolete.)

So, I went to one of those Mom-n-Pop computer stores and picked up a mobo. Of course it turns out that it's incompatible with my CPU. And that was the only one they had. So I had to order one from NewEgg, which should get here by Friday. God I hate computers.

At least I'll have the cabinet to start working on tomorrow.

First Post...

2006-07-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

So anyway it looks like the Arcade Cabinet Project is back in action. Which makes a lot of sense, seeing that I haven't started my new job yet. This blog is to track my progress with this progress from Day One to when it's all done (which could be a while). Here's how this all got started...

Years ago I stumbled upon a website called Build Your Own Arcade Controls (www.arcadecontrols.com), and I was hooked. My friends and I built a control panel, that we used to play MAME on my computer. That pic is from the inside of the control panel, signed by Paul.

Fast forward to present day, I was looking at that old control panel in the closet, and decided it was time to start working on the entire cabinet. I took a drive to Home Depot and was dismayed at how much tools plus supplies would cost me. As I drove away defeated, I passed by an arcade store, and figured I might as well stop in and check it out. Turns out the guy had an empty cabinet in the warehouse, so I bought it, and I'm going to be picking it up tomorrow.

I plan to post on here on any days that I've done work on the machine, with pictures and such. Hopefully I will be able to inspire others to do something like this, but I doubt it. If anything you can watch me make mistakes and get a good laugh out of it.