Hello Everyone, Recently I picked up this Space Invaders cab at a rummage sale for ten bucks. Here's a few pictures. Seems to be in pretty decent condition.
Normally, I am the type of guy who will make "the one arcade machine to rule them all" with all custom artwork, trackball, lit up controls with LED-Wiz, the whole 9 yards. So that was my first instinct on what to do with this cab again. But the original side art is in ok condition and it does look pretty cool, so it has me rethinking everything. I was thinking this might be a good time to try out a more minimalist approach, and make more of a budget cab. I mean, it is really the games you play, and how well executed your main menu is that really make a cab special. All the bells and whistles are nice of course, but just not always essential. Not to mention the fact that making one of these ultimate sorts of arcades gets pretty danged expensive. Along the way of making these other cabs, I seem to have acquired a whole ton of extra parts as well. I now have at my disposal a 20" CRT monitor, all black buttons, player buttons, two joysticks, a spare keyboard encoder and a pretty decent computer that just needs a hard drive. So that is a pretty good start to what I'd need to complete this cab.
Some things that I would still need are a speaker to use, and a used coin door to fit in here:
First, about the speaker, all I've used so far is a 2.1 PC speaker system, but that might be a little overkill for this cab (not to mention only one speaker hole). Is there a specific size speaker that is meant to fit in this size hole? And does that speaker have a standard 3.55mm male connector that I could connect into the audio out port on the computer? Just wondering if people had any recommendations on what to use here that is A) reasonably priced, and B) will easily interface with a computer. And maybe even has a volume control.
The second, about the coin door. I guess all the other cabs I've worked with had the standard Happ size coin doors in them, not one of these wide coin doors. Any idea where I could find a cheap used one of these? Is there anything special I would need to search for, when trying to find one, to find this type of coin door? I wasn't sure if there was a specific term used to describe this wider more rectangle sort of coin door or something?
About the only other thing I was thinking I might need is some cheap white or red buttons. As I mentioned before, I have a bunch of black (happ style) push buttons. I was thinking that I could swap the button part from the button casing in between the different colors, like I've seen others do before, just to spruce things up a bit.
Well I think that's all the questions I've got for now. Let me know what you guys think about the coin door and the speaker and if you have any recommendations for me! Thanks!
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Topic: Space Invaders cab just acquired - some initial questions (Read 2038 times)
