Hello,
I have been a lurker here for a while admiring all of the beautiful work and absorbing as much information as possible. I have finally gotten to the point where I am about ready to begin building my first MAME cabinet. I have gone through dozens of different designs and after not being happy with many of them I finally just decided to pick a design I had come across on these boards. I chose the Space Invaders cabinet design by
jahilton2002.
It just captures all of the design elements I like and wanted and thought if I like it so much I might as well build my cabinet similar. What were these elements I liked? Well, I wanted a slim cab for sure but not too slim that I couldn't get a good design to fit on the side. I also just liked the overall shape and the way the CP area was made. I like the way it is angled and that it all pulls out on rollers but also locks in place.
So I started messing around in Illustrator and Sketchup and I have the build plans almost done (I will post some pictures of the sketchup model once I finish it up). While I am a high school teacher, I am also a freelance graphic artist. When I am working on a project I have to come up with several different visual ideas of what I want something to look like before I get started. This gets me motivated and keeps me going. Plus I just like playing around with the graphic design side of things. I know I didn't want to do a generic MAME theme or Multicade kind of theme. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just isn't my thing. So, I made a list of some of the games I remember enjoying from my youth and also ones that I liked the graphic design for and started making some mock-ups. Luckily there is an abundance of great vector and hi-res arcade artwork out there to work with, and thank you to those that have provided it. The illustration below contains 5 designs that I liked and thought fit the cabinet ok. I had to do some rearranging on most of them, but I think they turned out OK. There were several others I would have liked to try as well, but their designs did not lend themselves well to this cabinet shape (Centipede, Tempest).
Of those designs, I have chosen at least at this time to go with Moon Patrol. A few reasons for this.
1. It is awesome looking!
2. I have access to a vinyl sign machine so I can easily make the side art for the cabinet without having to spend a lot of money on expensive full color prints.
3. It has the greatest marquee art ever!
4. It was one of my favorite games growing up.
I still like the other designs, but doing either the Moon Patrol theme or the Defender theme will save quite a bit of money since I won't have to buy two full side artwork prints from a printshop or gameongraphix.com (I still plan to use them for the marquee and CP). Speaking of CP's, these are 3 quick mockups I did last night to start to get the idea of what I want to do. As you can see I want a basic layout of 2 8-way sticks with 6 buttons each, a trackball, spinner and a 4-way stick with two buttons. I also plan to put a couple of flipper buttons on the sides for pinball. Right now I am leaning for V3 which is the one with the more monochromatic color palate. It is still up in the air though.
V1
V2
V3
On the woodworking front, while not an expert woodworker, i do know my way around a shop and I actually have access to two different full wood shops, so tools and workspace will not be too much of a problem. It will just slow down the process a bit as I will have to travel a bit to work on the building of the cab as I don't have the space in my garage to do that. As for the wiring and computer parts of the build, I feel pretty comfortable there. I have been designed and built a few dedicated sim racing rigs over the years and just completed my latest one in the spring. I also built my own steering wheels (actually steering wheels, not the motorized bases) and also built a set of hydraulic racing pedals using a real racing pedal box. So, the button wiring and interface isn't much of a concern to me and look forward to routing wires and such
Here are a few pics of that build, please disregard the messy wiring, I have since fixed this:
I plan to build my own PC for this but I am not quite sure what kind of horsepower I am going to need. I would like to save as much money as possible but still have something that is going to run everything I want to play. I have an i5 2500k OC'd and a 6970 2gb card in my racing rig, but I don't think I will need that much oomph in this machine as I plan on playing classic games 95% of the time. I do know I want to put an SSD in for the boot drive as that makes all of the difference in the world regarding boot up times. My racing machine boots up and is ready to go in about 15-20 seconds tops. In fact it is usually ready to go before I am. Other than that, it is kind of up in the air. What video card to most of you like to use in your machines?
Ok, that is enough rambling for now and I appreciate any constructive feedback I can get. This is my first build and I have already started acquiring a few parts here and there so I am getting pretty excited. Still though, I don't expect to be done before Christmas given my work schedule right now. I will try to keep this updated at least once every couple of weeks with progress and build pics. I plan on picking up one of the Hannspree "basketball" 28" monitors here in the next week or so for the build as well as that seems to be the best bang for the buck.