So I've been scouring this site for about a year now, and have had plans to build my machine for lets say about 5 years or so. But everything keeps getting in the way! Moved away, bought a house, did some serious renovations, took my part time home business into a new and full time direction. I'm still not done my renos, but I don't imagine they will be too much longer.
My fiance was randomly browsing the air miles page, seeing what she could get with her 400 points. The answer was very little. I decided to check mine, I carry the card and swipe it but never redeem. Well the time for redemption is NOW! I got $300 in gift certificates for the local home store [Rona]. Not my first choice, but if I can get gift cards for there why not? That will ll cover the cost of building the cabinet itself and leave me about... $240 left.
It will be 3 weeks before the gift cards arrive, but until then I can plan. Unfortunately business has slowed considerably for my home business during the holiday season, so we're on a strict budget - no extra spending allowed, especially since it's the time to be giving or some such nonsense.
So the details:
2 player standup
7 buttons each in the "Street Fighter with Run" or "SF/Neo Geo" setup
3" trackball in the middle
Spinner in the middle but on the front [there has been a lot of talk about this, but never seen it done... someone send links?]
2 aimtrack guns with built in holsters
2 USB ports on the bottom lip of the control panel for plugging in wired xbox360 controllers for 4 player if need be
24" LCD or possibly 27"... I'll have to check it out
30" wide
24" deep
6' tall + whatever the wheels/skirt measure... so probbly 6'3" or so
The control panel will be entirely between the sides of the cab - no wings or protrusions.
It'll be done up to fit in with it's surroundings!
Black elephant skin tolex/vinyl covering
White piping around the screen
Bezel made with marshall speaker grill cloth
Pinball flippers [white or black havent decided]
short admin panel with pause and exit - simple and out of the way
white t-molding
Happ coin door wired up for a credit when you insert a coin or push the reject
black buttons/ball
brushed bronze control panel - with numbers that go around the trackball to ELEVEN
Background of the front end [mala] made to look like the front of a Marshall 4x12 with the grill cloth and the logo. Background music and audio clips on the front end will be random spinal tap tunes and clips from both movies and the various performances/appearances they have done... for example:
The marquee will be something like Spinal Tapped or something similarly easy and stupid [just like spinal tap themselves].
I will initially gut an x-arcade and throw the parts in to play and swap parts in as I can afford them. The X-Arcade is just a temp. solution as I already have it.
So what have I done to date? Pulled apart 6 PCs from my graveyard and built 3 somewhat decent compys - 3 ghz processor, 2 gigs of ram each with windows xp. After this one is done I'll be making 2 minis, one for my nephews/niece, one for my godchildren. They will each be one player + usb port, using the x-arcade stuff. I've gotten ahold of about 6 hours of spinal tap material and edited it all down to about 4 hours of good stuff - everything from the songs to them heckling Metallica about stealing their album cover. Nigel Tufnel visiting the Marshall factory to unveil the JCM900 series [they go to twenty as standard]. I've mastered it all to be smooth from one bit to the next: countless hours of eqing, compression, limiting etc etc. I've got the background of the front end ready and am working on the menus.
This will sit in the lounge area of my recording studio. Let me give you a spiel on my studio: it's effin huge for a home studio, 1000 square feet. I am the only one who works there, and it is ***NOT*** open to the public. I write music there for some little things but hopefully soon some bigger things. I do however love to rock and have big jam sessions and jam parties, and my studio doubles as a wicked jam space for me and my musician buddies. Hence: The arcade machine. It's popular enough being on a TV with the x-arcade, but it's really lame IMO.
Why such a big screen? Well, a 27" widescreen LCD is totally not arcadely authentic, I agree. But I was thinking having a large screen would be a better way to save space in the lounge. I could forgo a bigger TV for the guests [the lounge doubles as a second guest bedroom, it has a pull-out couch, mainly for godchildren/nephews/niece]. The angle would be annoying pointing slightly up and away, but like I said it's mainly for the kids when they visit. I was thinking of putting a sliding shelf in a dado removable from the back panel with the PC guts mounted to it, and from the coin door side an easily accessible DVD drive for dropping in a movie or whatever. And of course the obligatory HDMI port possibly on the back of the machine for my nephews who don't go anywhere without their Xbox360. All surface-mounted ports will be neutrik or switchcraft panel mount jacks.
I have a render, and I'll post it later when I get downstairs to the studio - don't expect anything much, I just did it for measurements and to check out the shape. My render is terrible compared to what some of you guys do. For example, my joysticks are just cylinders