Main > Project Announcements
The Mame Tapper build - Finished! - 12/1/2010
markronz:
Hello everyone-
I've begun work on my second arcade machine. This one is going to have a Tapper theme to it, except that I wanted to do a black and red color scheme, so I had a friend do a little custom art work for me to modify the original Tapper artwork a bit. I do have a full blog here, if interested, tracking my overall build, but I figured that most people don't need to see the entire process step by step, so I thought I'd at least post a few pictures on the forum as well. We all love pics! :pics
If anyone has any questions about the build or feedback or anything at all just let me know! Let the pictures begin!
I found a gutted cab in town, fairly cheap. You can ignore the deer hunter marquee on there, that's not what game it really was. Not sure why I put that on there for the picture, I guess I just thought it looked empty at the time without a marquee. Anyway, I really liked the faux wood look it had, and I intend to keep it that way. It was in generally pretty good condition. There was some damage along the bottoms of the machine, but nothing I couldn't conceal.
The first thing I did was to gut the cabinet even more, sand all the insides down a bit, primed everything to get that clean look and feel back, and then added some wheels to it.
Next I cut a shelf for my control panel box I made to rest on top of.
I repaired the affore mentioned damaged bottoms of the cab. I used black corner protectors, and some corner guards to clean things up a bit.
This cabinet will have all the buttons and trackball and etc lit up when I am finished with it. I also got a cold cathode sound sensitive light bar. The idea is that the lights on the bottom of the arcade machine will flash along with the sound of whatever game you are playing. If the flashing lights gets annoying or distracting, I can just flip it to just be permanently on instead. I think it will be a pretty cool little addition.
Here's a bottom up view of where the light bar is installed to give you some idea.
I added some speaker holes, speaker grills, more black corner guards, and the start of the t-molding to the front bottom of the cabinet.
I then began painting everything I needed to, and of course primed everything first.
I installed some exhaust fans and grills onto the cab. There's one pulling in cold air on the bottom of the cab, and one on the top blowing out hot air.
The fans have red LEDs in them as well. Here's a picture of them lit up just to give you an idea of what they look like.
I decided to restore the original coin door that came on the machine. Here is a before and after picture. I really should have used a spray paint of some sort instead of my normal paint, but it did end up ok anyway. I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. It was a lot of work stripping off the old paint, so I am not sure I am willing to try it again, but it was ok to do once. Anyway, you can tell the after look is MUCH improved from where I started.
I painted everything I needed to black, I installed the coin door onto the cab again, and I attached my control panel box to the cabinet.
I decided to make a hidden admin panel to go behind the bottom coin door. I added a volume knob to this after I took this picture as well. Also in the picture you can see the DVD drive, a USB drive, and two admin buttons. The toggle switch is a DPDT switch. I am using this to hide my mouse buttons on my control panel. When you flip the switch, P1B5 and P1B6 will turn into left and right mouse click buttons. When you flip the switch back, they will be the normal buttons. This was my attempt to keep the control panel a little less cluttered. My cp will have a few dedicated admin buttons on there, as I enjoy the convenience, but I always felt the mouse buttons were taking up too much space for how often I had to use them.
Here you can see the admin panel installed behind the bottom coin door.
Here is that custom artwork I was referring to. It's a low res picture, but the real one looks much better, and looks great when printed. I feel that we kept the overall Tapper feel in tact, but changed the color scheme.
Here is a picture of the current state of the machine, with the marquee installed as well.
And here is another view.
Well thats as many pictures as I have so far. I will update once I complete some more work. I am like 75% done with about 5 different things right now, so there's a lot of balls in the air at the moment. I suspect they will all be finished about the same time, so I will likely have another big update once this happens.
Again, let me know if anyone has any questions, or feedback or anything! Thanks!
borals:
Love the look & feel of this cab, reminds me of the show Cheers hahahaha.
CapriRS302:
Awesome! Tapper is probably my all time favorite game, after super mario bros.
You should design a beer tap that slides over your joystick so you can be authentic when playing tapper.
Also some of the stuff that reembles a bar from the original machine would be nice, like a footrail and cup holders and such...
markronz:
--- Quote from: borals on September 21, 2010, 08:32:42 pm ---Love the look & feel of this cab, reminds me of the show Cheers hahahaha.
--- End quote ---
:) Thanks. I liked the show Cheers, and now that you mention it, with the curvy letters, it does look similar. But I was just copying the original as close as I could:
--- Quote from: CapriRS302 on September 22, 2010, 09:29:04 am ---You should design a beer tap that slides over your joystick so you can be authentic when playing tapper.
Also some of the stuff that reembles a bar from the original machine would be nice, like a footrail and cup holders and such...
--- End quote ---
That would be awesome if I could get a beer tap. I'll have to look into that, and see if there's a way that would work. :)
And yeah, I loved the original Tapper machine. Some day I'd love to own a real one myself. But unfortunately I don't have any metal working skills to try to replicate anything like that. Still should look pretty sweet as it is though. I got my side art yesterday, and it looks amazing.
JustMichael:
I love Tapper. Simple game play but can be quite frustrating! :angry: :banghead: