"Raiders of the Lost Arcade" - a (mostly) finished first build

[chillicrackers]

Hi folks,

  I've been a lurker on these boards for a while now, and it has been an invaluable source of information for our first time build. It was finally completed by me and my brother recently, and I thought I would share the results, as it's in no small part thanks to the BYOAC forums (whether you knew it or not) that we managed it, so thanks to you all, and a special thanks to Pongo for his help with the vinyl button stickers.

  We loosely based the design on the Evo Upright but without any proper plans to work to, most of it was trial and error. I have an obsession with Indiana Jones (ever since I was a child - love all three movies) and the machine name just popped into my head.  It later occurred to me that I stole it from a Futurama episode.  The system runs on a customised Wah!Cade under Linux, using a custom skin and has MAME, Mega Drive / Genesis, SNES, C64, Amiga, Spectrum and Gameboy Advance emulation running on it currently.  I don't want to waffle on for too long, so here are some pictures!  If you have any questions about the build, feel free to ask.

Humble beginnings...




First monitor fitting - thank god it did! Only 2mm clearance each side!




The (mostly) finished article:




Thanks for reading! 

[Mark Thomas]

Nice work buddy have you got any more pics?

[chillicrackers]

I'm trying to get a gallery sorted out for all the pics, to save clogging up a thread with a ton of images.  In the meantime I'll post the specs of the machine.  I mainly did the hard labour, along with the artwork (not amazing I know, but I wanted it home made to some extent) while my brother did the computer hardware / software side of things.

The screen is a 27.5" HannsG HZ281 computer monitor, 16:10 rather than 16:9, which was a plus.  The sound system we used was a Speedlink Gravity Wave (SL-8220-SBK) with some car speakers bought at the local Maplin (uk electronics retailer), which actually sound very good together when cranked up!  The computer itself is an AMD A4-3400 (FM1 2.7GHz 1MB 65W) with 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 in an Asus F1A75 (AMD FM1 DDR3 mATX) alongside an OCZ Technology 60GB Agility 3 SSD.  It's a all housed inside a standard cheap case, with the front microphone socket modified to act as an extension to the ATX power switch (using an arcade button) so that the computer can be taken out and used alone if necessary.  The buttons and sticks were the kit bought from Gremlin Solutions, all wired into an IPAC2.

I'm pretty new to the whole mame machine thing, but I loved arcade games as a kid and I now seem to have contracted the bug for building - my second is in the planning phase right now.  It's going to be a dual-aimtrak design shooter cabinet called "Total Recoil".  Gotta love them film puns!

[Uncle Monkey]

not bad at all....

[Santoro]

Love the shape - looks great!

[zato1ch1]

Looks great!  I for one wouldn't mind if you clogged up the thread with a few more pics.