DIY: Building A Home Arcade Cabinet
Written by Tyler Miller   
Friday, 15 January 2010 00:06
Home Arcade

First off -- I know, it's been almost two years since I said I would start building an arcade cabinet... I've been busy!. After all this time I'm happy to say that I've finished the woodwork of the cabinet, the intallation of the MAME front end and the ROMs and all of the wiring for the joysticks and buttons. Basically it's all done. All that is missing are the finer details like side art, button labels and printed screen instructions for how to manipulate the MAME interface with just the buttons.

Over all I'm very happy with the outcome. I have a completely free, constantly running collection of arcade classics at my fingertips at all times. When I wake up and go grab some orange juice from the fridge I can, and usually do, hit up a game of Galaga on my way to the kitchen. For all of those times when I was a kid playing Street Figher in the pizza parlour, just wishing I could flip open that coin door and hit the switch that signals a coin insert, I now can.

Hard At Work

But it wasn't easy or fun, for the most part. I started out with nothing more than the dimensions for the two side-panels. From there out I just made it up as I went. I looked online for the measurements for the marquee sign on the front (23.05 X 6.3 inches, btw) and based ecerything off of that, building the frame and supports where I figured they would be needed most.

I picked up a 10 year-old computer on Craigslist and put some MAME software on it, learning how from forums and how-to site I Googled. From those places I learned about the Ipac, a little device that goes between the keyboard and computer that translates the button presses on the control panel in to keystrokes for the computer to read.

The hardest part of it all was wiring the Ipac to the buttons and joysticks-- A huge pain in the ass. Trying to solder, failing at soldering, striping the wires, placing connectors, attatching leads, finding the shorts, daisy-chaining the ground wires... it took the most online research. Once all that was done it came down to putting everything in place and configuring the settings in the MAME program to display the right way.

There She Is

So there you have it, probably my last post about building my cabinet. If you have any questions about making one for yourself, by all means ask away in the comments section. It would make me feel very cool to  give some feedback to people who are as lost as I was when I was half way through.

PS - I'm selling it for $1000.00 USD, must pick-up. Any takers?
Comments (5)
0
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written by Joshua Pohl, January 15, 2010
Whoa! That is awesome. Congratulations! I wonder if I'll ever have the money and time to try something like that...
onionsaregross
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written by onionsaregross, January 15, 2010
what's the most recent game you have loaded, i.e. at what year does it stop? can it run capcom games (final fight, sf2, etc)? most importantly, simpsons arcade?
markhill66
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written by markhill66, January 15, 2010
Can you hook up a CD shooting gun and some Aerosmith tunes to it?
0
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written by Tyler Miller - Editor, January 15, 2010
The latest game it has in Mortal Kombat 3, but it chugs. If I payed more for a beefier CPU I could run whatever ROM I put on there. As it was it only cost $40.

0
adding games
written by Art Aguirre, July 15, 2010
Is there a way to add games to an existing arcade machine(ex: mortal kombat 1 machine by midway)? Without interfering with the original game?

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