Greetings-
I've been a long time lurker of this community but I figured now is a good time to finally join and become a contributing member. I have always admired the craftsmanship and creativity of all the members here and always wanted to build something similar myself. My knowledge and ownership of any sort of tools through-out my life has been bare minimal which has hindered any progress I have made towards this hobby. I bought the project arcade book a few years back- read it cover-to-cover and was super excited to get started. I bought some joysticks/buttons/i-pac and tinkered but never got far as I didn't have the skills to start a cabinet build and didn't really want to get a kit/couldn't find a good deal on an empty cab.
So with it being a new year and my goal of learning new things I started construction on my very first woodworking project of any kind- a Bartop Arcade. I wish I would have taken more pictures during the cutting/assembly but you'll get the picture. I bought 2 tools a cheap pawn shop jigsaw and a skil router from lowes to get me started.
I am doing sort of a Donkey Kong theme and more of a focus on the 80s based games with this build and hoping that I achieve some success with this so I can build a few more geared towards 90s/neo-geo stuff.
Here are some of the items I've acquired so far for the build.
Asus PTGV-DM w/ 1.7 ghz Celeron (using onboard video/audio)/1GB Ram/power supply - $15
15" HP LCD (mounting vertical) $30 (second hand store)
I-PAC 2 - purchased awhile ago
Ball top joystick/buttons - purchased awhile ago
Here is a look at my progress so far. My apologies for the pictures not being the best- poor lighting/iphone camera.
Priming...
More priming...
Painting the interior
I went with a similar blue color as seen on some of the Donkey Kong cabinets. 2nd coat shown here (applied 4)
Making progress.....
Motherboard/Cpu/Ram/Power supply came in the mail. The motherboard is a lot smaller than I expected which is a plus.
Control Panel Overlay that I am going to use- ordered through Game On Grafix- also having them print the original Donkey Kong Marquee for me scaled to fit.
More to come soon.........