Game on

I got the smart power strip and hooked everything up to a single button on the back panel. Now it's game time (hmm, maybe I should've played Q*bert first, but it'll definitely be within the first eighty games played).

And there is a keyboard drawer:

Gotta play Mario. To the left of the monitor are two buttons labeled "Quit" and "Pause". That's so noobs can use the machine without having to hold their hand.

Cabinet about done

The pictures below are the completed cabinet shell except for the acrylic sheet in front of the monitor and the coin door (which has been ordered).

Then a fun part comes - not the most fun since I can't play games yet - but setting up the computer will be a little fun. I've tried a couple front ends to let me switch between games and emulators, but all they do is make me want to write my own front end. Then I'll have the ultimate flexibility, I don't care about graphical flashiness. Anyway... picture time:

LCD mount

The end is near. Doesn't mean I'm getting closer to it though. But I see it.

The LCD monitor is ready to be mounted. I made a custom bezel for it out of hemlock moulding. See below:

Since the LCD isn't magical and can't float in a fixed position in space, I need to mount it to the cabinet somehow. That somehow is just plywood that's attached to the back of the LCD using the standard mounting holes. I put some screws through it at 100mm spacing, and that's shown below:

The board is as wide as the inside of the cabinet (23") so it'll be easy to mount it somehow.

Keyboard hack/admin buttons

Now I want to have separate buttons for quitting and pausing games. This would've been possible with combo button presses, but the basic controls should be obvious to a moron playing on the machine for the first time. All of the eight buttons were already taken on each joystick, so how can I add a few more buttons? The answer is to bust open an old keyboard and connect buttons to the circuit board. This is very cheap, almost free if I didn't have to buy a soldering iron and solder and wire. But even with that junk, it's still half the price of buying a dedicated key encoder.

In the picture below, the middle green board is from an old Microsoft natural elite keyboard. The soldering points are in a logical location and it's easy to solder new wires to them. Some newer keyboards (like a USB keyboard that I opened) have such a tiny encoder chip on the board that there are no solder points (everything is covered up).

At the maximum, I want to add five buttons: Escape, pause, speed-up, coin 1 and coin 2 (actually I just want the coin buttons to be available for the inevitable addition of a coin door). For this keyboard encoder, it requires nine wires for those five buttons. I don't need every key combination, which would've required twenty-four wires and a couple more wiring blocks.

Marquee test

I wanted to see what the marquee and control panel looked like when they were attached. Nobody stopped me from doing it, so I took a picture:

Hmm, looks like the yellow sides are splotchy. Screw it, I'm not put on any more coats. Maybe it'll even out when it dries and when the acrylic clearcoat is added. There's going to be big stickers on the sides anyway to distract attention.

The t-molding is going to make the cabinet look quite nice. That's probably the next step after the front door is attached.

Assembly - begin!

After about three weekends of work, I finally had something that looked like an arcade cabinet.

Here we have the sides, base, middle, and top screwed together. You can also see the fan at the back of the base. It's just a computer case fan. I don't know why it likes computer cases so much.

Then I screwed the speakers to the speaker panel, attached it, and added the flourescent light. I think the front drawer is also added in the following pic, it's kind of hard to see.

Casters and yellow

Painting is as fun as... wiring. While yellow symbolizes sunlight, it also symbolizes the end of painting. After I was done painting the sides yellow, it was time to put all the pieces together. And in doing so, the sides got all messed up and needed to be repainted with many coats.

Also before putting the junk together, I put the casters on the base, under the base I mean.

In the next post you'll see the assembled pieces. But since this is a blog and you're reading backwards through time, you already know what it's going to look like.

Wiring is boring

Hmm, what could be the most boring thing I could show. I know! The control panel wiring. Not only is it boring to look at, it was boring to install. Strip a wire, crimp a wire, cut a wire, over and over. And I don't even have that many controls.

The Ultrastik sends both the joystick and button data to the computer through USB. That's why all the button wires end up going right into the ass of the joystick.

Top of the control panel

Once the control panel and front panel were painted, I could put the laminate on them. I assume that the adhesive will stick better to paint than wood.

Lower angle:

I've been waiting a while to actually install the joysticks and buttons, I got them before any of the real work began. They still need to be wired up.

Painting

Since I'm making a cabinet that looks like a Q*Bert cabinet, the color choices are easy: The sides are yellow, everything else is black. Rather than put the cabinet together first, I painted it first. This way it takes more time and is more annoying.

The primer goes on first:

Then a couple coats of semi-gloss black:

The previous picture shows the control panel and front panel, which will be covered in laminate anyway. But they still get painted for some reason.

Subassemblies

I liked how the retro-arcade.net site had assembled the cabinet using subassemblies. I incorporated that into my design, it's more flexible. Here is the subassembly for the top:

Here's the front panel:

Here's the top of the control panel:

Here's the subassemblies resting near where they would really go. Except for the drawer, which was being lazy and just sat around in the wrong place.

Wireframe view

The previous image of the 3D model was shaded in, but I thought it would be cool to see it in wireframe:

Now how is that LCD monitor going to be mounted? That was a mystery.

The profile has smooth curves rather than the sharp angles in that image. Even though I was able to get measurements from a real Q*Bert cab, I later found a website that has dimensions: jakobud.com. The distance between the two side panels is 23", which makes for a total width of 24.5".

Cutting the wood

It was time to cover the whole garage in layers of sawdust. The plywood was first rough-cut with a circular saw to get near the lines. Then I used a router to accurately get right up to the line. The cabinet sides came out looking like this:

Both side panels are exactly the same because I used a router template bit to cut the second one, using the first one as a template. So that didn't take much time, but what took too much time was the billion little pieces for each subassembly. A table saw would've been ideal, but I don't own one.

It was time to start putting the pieces together.

Marquee and front panel art

Got these from eBay:

They are the marquee art (which will be lit up by a flourescent light) and the front panel art. The only art that didn't arrive yet is for the side panels, which was ordered from arcadeshop.com.

Artwork is a big part of the final cost. At first I wanted to paint all the images myself, which is totally doable, but that would've taken a long time. I'd rather be playing on the machine than spend tons of hours standing next to it making detailed paintings.

All prices include shipping:

• Front panel art from eBay: $23.88
• Marquee art from eBay: $12.00
• Side panel art: $77.00
• Custom control panel art: $55.24
• Total: $168.12

Control panel overlay

In order to order a custom control panel overlay, I needed to take the original Q*bert control panel overlay, and customize it. This way it will match my two joystick layout. Luckily the overlay art was recreated by a nice person and posted to localarcade.com. I took their image, modified it to match my layout, and spewed this out:

I didn't have room for the original Q*bert instruction panel and character panel. Oh well. Once the image was generated (at 300dpi), I sent it off to mamemarquees.com and got it printed. When it arrived, it looked like this, except that in real life it isn't covered in JPEG artifacts:

Controlling the panel

While one of my brain's threads was focused on the cabinet design, the other thread could spin on the control panel design. The cheap-ass in me thought about getting an X-arcade prebuilt panel, but the artist in me beat the cheap-ass to a bloody stump and forced me to build a custom panel. Note: The X-arcade isn't really cheap, but I could've bought a used one from a friend.

The small size of the Q*bert control panel forced me to punt the idea of a trackball and basically anything else besides two joysticks and some buttons. That is fine since I will be playing: Ms. Pac-Man, Robotron, Robotron, Pac-Man, and Robotron, and old Nintendo games. I decided on analog joysticks from Ultimarc because then in an emergency, I can play Marble Madness with some speed control. When the stuff arrived in the mail, it looked like this:

I went with some expensive joysticks, so their total price was well over $100. It's possible to get joysticks for much less than that, but they wouldn't have analog control or a built-in USB connection.

Getting the woody

Once I designed how the cabinet will be put together, I knew how much wood I would need. Most people need three sheets of 4x8' plywood, but thanks to my small cabinet and some spare plywood, I could get by with two sheets. Each sheet of 3/4" thick sanded-on-one-side (ACX) plywood was $40.


I exploded the AutoCAD model and arranged each 3D solid onto 4x8' sheets, plus some scrap. There wasn't any room for mistakes.

Why make a stupid blog?

Q: Why would I create a retarded blog about the process of building an arcade cabinet?
A: Because many other people have done the same. Without the other blogs I wouldn't have had valuable learning material. This is payment for their work. I don't need to list any sites, just do an internet search and tons of hits pop up. Even making guesses at blogspot sites will give results.

Designing

In order to design the cabinet, I got to put my AutoCAD skills to work. I measured the Q*bert cabinet, made some modifications, and came up with this:


Those colors are just for visibility, they have nothing to do with what the final thing will look like. I made some modifications from the "real" design:

• The angle of the monitor is much steeper, I don't want to look down into the cabinet.
• There is a 19" standard aspect ratio LCD monitor. Some morons consider this small, but it fits well in this cabinet and is big enough.
• There are two joysticks for multiplayer games.
• There are six buttons per joystick.
• There is a drawer under the control panel for putting a keyboard or chewing tobacco or whatever.
• There is no coin door, at least for now. That can be added later when I feel like wasting even more money on useless junk.

Searching for info on the web was helpful in figuring out what should be done. It turns out that someone else already documented their Q*bert cab building process, and it's way better than what I will be doing. Here is a link: http://www.retro-arcade.net/

Finding the design

It took a while to figure out what arcade cabinet I wanted. I looked on Craigslist and eBay every day, hoping to find a local seller with a cheap cabinet. Nothing good showed up. I was leaning towards building it myself anyway. At work I heard that there were some games upstairs, so I went to take a look. There were a bunch of ugly ass cabinets and then the most perfect cabinet I have seen - the Q*bert cabinet. I didn't know what I was looking for until I found it. The size is good - it's small and won't take up much room at home. The colors and graphics are good. Plus Q*bert isn't too bad of a game.
I knew that I wanted that cabinet and I wanted to build it myself. Screw trying to fix up someone else's crappy cabinet. It was time to get measurements and start designing.

Thinking about it

I had to get started before the initial inspiration wore off. The only things I knew were:

• I wanted an upright cabinet
• and my spare computer can run an emulator to play any old arcade game.

I assumed that the computer would be most of the total cost, and I already had one, so the whole project could be finished on the cheap. We'll see how wrong this is in future posts. (One thing that makes it wrong is that computers are stinky cheap now).

I didn't know if I would buy a new arcade cabinet shell, a used old game, or build one from scratch.

By the way, until my posts catch up with my progress, they'll be written in the past tense.

Initial inspiration

A recent trip to a bar called The Spot had me sitting at a Ms. Pac-man cocktail cabinet. Nothing beats (Ms.) Pac-man using a real joystick, at double speed. I remember wishing that there was some way I could play this at home. Then I realized - this cabinet is just made of wood, a computer, a monitor... and other stuff. It's nearly trivial to create one. I immediately declared my intention to build an arcade cabinet of my own. People may have assumed that this was just drunken bullshitting, but I knew I was serious. So the quest began.