Okay, I've finally got sawdust on the shop floor, so I might as well add my own project announcement for the mini vertical MAME cabinet I'm building for my son's 5th birthday.
The Games: I've about decided to play vertical games only on this game. Also, I'm not planning to load every game in existence. Right now, I have a list of about 70 vertical games... mostly from the 80's and early 90's.
Front End: MALA
I really like it.
Cabinet Size: My wife did not like the idea of me building a refrigerator sized toy for the house. I showed her a mini MAME cabinet and she thought it was really nice. So, the design is going to be a 3/4 scale cabinet (about 50 inches tall).
Cabinet Style: I originally was going to just scale down a Galaga cabinet. However, I didn't like the idea of using something so recognizable, and then not having it be a faithful reproduction. So, I looked around at other cabinets. I really wanted this thing to look like the cabinets I played on in the 80's. I liked certain things about different cabs. My favorite was the Galaga/Ms. Pacman cabs and the Taito cabs. I decided to see what I could put together from the two styles. Finally, I ended up introducing Rastan to Ms. Pacman, played a little soft 80's music and let nature take it's course.
Their resulting love child was a 3/4 scale cab that had the features I liked best from the two.
Cabinet Theme: The name of the arcade is "American Ace". My son likes airplanes and shoot'em ups, so I'm going to theme the cabinet after WWII American fighters.
The Brains: I bought an Intel Atom motherboard, memory, power supply and hard drive. I didn't feel like messing with older hardware. In retrospect, I wish I had just bought an old PC off Craigslist (it would have been cheaper.... and couldn't have been any more frustrating.
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Controls: I picked up a U360 with an octagonal restrictor, some leaf switch GGG buttons, couple of standard micro switch buttons, four volcano buttons (for admin), a spinner from Ultimarc, and an IPac.
Montior: Ive got a 17 CRT Pc monitor Im going to mount vertically. This is going to be a tight squeeze. Ill give more details as things get implemented.
I made a template out of 1/2 inch MDF. I'll use this to route both side panels. I made the template deeper than it will end up (I'll likely take an inch or two off the back. I made it oversized so that I would be able to fit my monitor. Once the monitor is in, I'll trim whatever I can off the back.
And some components I've collected this far...