My self-built arcade cabinet

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[Khalan]

Not sure if anyone's interested in this, but I thought I'd post anyway.

Over the last week or so I've planned and built my own arcade cabinet, running MAME.  A fairly simple design, I used MDF with pine bracing, glued, screwed and nailed together.  All I used was a drill, a belt sander and a jigsaw.  Haven't done carpentry for a very long time, so it came out better than I hoped.

*Click images for full size*


I picked up an Asus EEEPC netbook for $240, and it runs everything smoothly that I've tried so far.  It's hidden under the cabinet, accessible from the back:


For speakers I used a pair of Logitech X-140s, which are surprisingly good for low cost 2.0 speakers ($35).


The control panel is an X-Arcade Dual Joystick, as I didn't want to build my own and fiddle with all the electronics.  So far it's been great - responsive and sturdy.  The kids (including me) have been having a great time on it.

I skipped T-moulding as I didn't have a router.

Total cost is around $700 including materials and parts ($240 PC, $200 control panel, $150 LCD).  Much cheaper than the $2000-$4000 prices that you would normally pay.

Next up is to add a bit of artwork.  I'm currently working on a simple marquee that I'll have printed as a poster, this is what I have so far, it may change:

[Khalan]

Got some artwork on now.  The white bits alongside the pictures is glue and will disappear once dried.

[City Builder]

Seriously?  You built that yourself?

That is amazing work, it looks completely like a profesional company made it somewhere, it looks totally professional in those images.

I'm astonished that you made that with built that with only 3 tools.

Looks really fantastic

[Khalan]

Thanks CB!  I haven't really done anything since year 10 woodworking class about 15 years ago, but I just made sure I took my time and planned everything out.  Even so I still made a few mistakes that I had to fix up.  My dad helped me though, was much easier with another pair of hands to brace and hold things etc.  This morning I picked up a decent workbench and some clamps, so it'll be easier in the future if I do any more work.

The cabinet's definitely not as neat as the professional ones, but I'm quite happy with it.

[City Builder]

In our house, it's my wife Samantha that does all the carpentry stuff.  She leaves the electrical, plumbing and the like up to me to deal with.

I think it was maybe 4 years ago that she built me beautiful cabinetry to hold all my video games, these things are quite large, almost 6 feet tall, and 4 feet wide and I don't even know how deep, with doors, and glass and molding etc etc etc.  And not only did she make me one, but she made me 4 of them, and yet somehow managed to do it that I never saw her working on them and didn't know until it was my bday.

I think maybe she just wanted to get all the cardboard boxes stacked up in the parlor and home office out of the way

[Khalan]

I made up a custom frontend today using Mala, which I may tweak further:


I'm using VNC to log in remotely to the arcade cabinet to do any admin work.  Easier than using the netbook inside the cabinet (though I did put castor wheels on it so it can be moved easily).

[crowebird]

Wow! I am impressed, looks awesome!

[Khalan]

Thanks crowebird.

I'm already thinking of upgrading to an i5 system in there, so that it can run my PS2 and Dreamcast games as well.  Soul Calibur 3 to be specific, as it still seems to have the best single-player of the series.  I made an ISO of my disk yesterday to test on my desktop system and it runs fine using PCSX2 4600 using my Phenom II, so it should run even better with an i5 2500k, which can apparently be easily over-clocked to 4ghz on air cooling.

This is how my front-end ended up: