New cabinet build project, my first one!

[IAmDotorg]

I've been working for a bit now on a new cabinet build -- my first one after quite a few years of wanting to have the time and room for one.

Just to start off, because I've seen the threads on here and people seem to sometimes get a bit nasty... I'm not driving up into the woods of Maine to cut down any trees, not planning on doing any milling or stripping of wood, kiln drying or pressing of any plywood, nor processing of oil into plastics for the components, and I've got very few silicon crystals growing for chip fabrication. So, fair warning -- I'm only assembling it, not building it from raw elements. While my credit card is getting a bit of a workout, most of the stuff I've bought has been with Paypal, so this ain't no credit card queen!

I've waffled for ages on what exactly I wanted to build... a JAMMA system? MAME? Something more than just MAME? Two player? Four player? Conservative number of joysticks? A control panel that would get me shamed on the Internet?

What I settled on was a few requirements:
- I want to be able to play MAME games up through the early 90's. I'm old(ish), those are the games I like -- at least arcade-wise.
- I want to avoid wasting screen space for the mash-up of vertical and horizontal games I play. On-screen bezels are nice, but shrinking the play-space isn't.
- I want both spinner and trackball controls along with joysticks -- the games I like make liberal use of all of them.
- I occasionally want to be able to play 4-player games, but its not often.
- I want it to look relatively conservative, especially when not being used, because its going to the side in my home theater, not a blinky-bright game room

Lots of sketching and fiddling (and failed attempts at using Sketchup), and I realized I really didn't want to build an upright cabinet. They're a little overpowering in a room, especially if you start putting more than a small set of controls, and there's really not any good way to get them to not scream "ARCADE CABINET HERE!" in a room. It also becomes a good bit fiddly to rig a screen rotation or something.

I realized a cocktail cabinet is really the best form-factor for me. Its bigger, in terms of floor space, but not as "ARCADE CABINET HERE!!1" as an upright. And some of the more modern 4-player designs a number of companies were selling opened up the possibility of spreading out controls a bit, and solving the vertical and horizontal problem.

I decided what I really wanted was a cocktail cabinet that I could play older vertical arcade games on by sitting on the ends, and newer or multiplayer by sitting on the long side. Some four-player games could be played on all four sides, in theory, with some fiddling of controls. (If you rotate the joystick 90 degrees, in theory player 3 and 4 could play a game like Gauntlet, without being all disoriented by having "up" on the stick go "left" in the game, for example -- I had to actually try it with a monitor laid down and a gamepad, but it was fine!)

I also thought, if I could build the control panels with enough room, I could put a trackball on one end, and a spinner on the other... so trackball games could be played by sitting on one end of the table, and spinner or spinner+joystick games like Tron on the other.

The problem was, none of the cabinets I was finding had big enough control panels to do that without severely jamming the controls together. (And, to be clear, my woodworking skills are a known factor here, and not sufficient to DIY the cabinet at a quality I'd be happy having out in my home theater)

Thankfully, some folks on Reddit directed me to Haruman ... and suddenly I could maybe make it work!

I had a pretty good idea what the hardware and features I wanted were going to be, and a gazillion e-mails and quite a good number of iterations of CAD drawings sent to him later, we're getting nailed down the overall design of the cabinet. (I'm getting excited here!)  Basically I mocked up and printed out full size a dozen mockups each of the three control panels, settled on sizes that would work with his base cabinet design, and ended up control panels that both fit the controls I wanted, weren't going to be too "busy" AND could be cut and fit on the cabinet.

Where I'm ending up:

- Custom CNC'd cocktail cabinet from Haruman, with largely birth plywood construction that'll be stained to match the other furniture in the room.
- HyperSpin front-end (wow, what a LOT of work setting that up has been!), configured with MAME, 8-bit Atari, the various Nintendo consoles, etc ... Also some PC and Steam games.
- New 3.7ghz Core i3 4360 PC, SSD, 8GB RAM on a MicroATX motherboard with built-in wifi and bluetooth, GE Force GTX 760 video
- "Horizontal" panel is going to be two UltraStik360 sticks, so I can play both 2/4/8 way games and analog games. Each player gets eight RGB-lightable buttons. Left panel is in the "SEGA" 8-button layout that seems to be pretty common for people to use. The right one is the same layout, but the buttons are rotated 10% counter clockwise around the bottom left button, which lets the player sitting there sit a half-foot to the right without being at a weird angle in the wrist. There's a dedicated HyperPause button in the middle, and two flanking player start buttons. I didn't see the need for a plethora of other admin buttons. (I went 8-button for other non-MAME emulators like N64)
- One end panel has an UltraStik360, four buttons in a grid layout, and an UltraTrak trackball, left to right. Trackball and buttons are RGB illuminated. There's also a HyperPause button and a Player Start. (The start buttons -- all of them -- will have shift functions for any admin controls I may need.) Enough gap is left to avoid knuckle jams using the trackball.
- The other end has the same layout, but instead of the trackball, its it'll get one of the push/pull spinners from GroovyGameGear.
- One end will have pinball flipper buttons, too.
- The end panels are going to be 4" wider than typical, which gives plenty of room to have the trackball and spinner without things being jammed in.
- All the lightable controls are RGB, so LEDBlinky can illumate which position to sit in for a given game, which buttons to use, etc. (Ie, if a player selects Centipede from HyperSpin, it should illuminate the trackball, start/pause and a single "fire" button on one end of the table.)
- The sides of the end control panels that face the "front" of the cabinet also are going to have USB ports. That allows me to have some 4-player games that won't work with players sitting sideways to the screen (pretty much all of them) playable using the two sticks on the cabinet, and external gamepads for the other two players that can just be plugged in.
- The rear of the cabinet will have power, and two HDMI ports.

Why the HDMI ports?

I was impressed with how well the Dolphin emulator plays all my Wii games -- I miss playing Wii games because my console has been in a drawer for a few years. My primary gaming screen is set up for my xboxes and it just doesn't work well there. It also doesn't hurt that Dolphin can make them all HD. I have an old LCD TV, so I'm going to wall-mount it above/behind the cocktail cabinet in the room.  The PC has built-in bluetooth, and the Wiimotes all work fine with it. I've thrown together some software to allow me to set up the Hyperspin script to switch which HDMI port is the primary monitor when the Wii emulator starts, so it can run on the second monitor (which would be the TV) and switch back when the emulator exits. (I may actually go an extra step and put an IR blaster on it, so it turns the TV on and off as well.)  Unfortunately, at least so far in my fiddling, HyperSpin doesn't seem to understand it might still be on-screen when an emulator is running on another monitor.

The second port will be used for my Oculus Rift. There's a few games I like playing with it, but they're tough to play with a mouse/keyboard because you can't see the mouse and keyboard. I think the right key mappings with the controls on the cabinet will make a bunch of the Rift games easier to play.

Its also got wireless audio, so I can use it as a jukebox in the room through the full stereo, for when we're analog gaming. The jukebox software is custom, ties into Microsoft's Xbox Music service. (It works a lot like Xbox Music on Windows 8, only with keyboard controls designed for the cabinet controls.) I may eventually try to clean it up and make it available.

So the hope is, it'll end up being a all-in-one arcade/console/PC gaming system, jukebox and VR setup all hiding in a small cocktail cabinet, all controllable via the cabinet controls, all while looking as conservative as possible in the room.

No photos yet. I've got piles of parts, and the PC setup is pretty much done and working other than LEDBlinky configuration (which needs the cabinet done). Next step is getting the cabinet finalized and ordered with Haruman, assembled and finished! Then its a lot of wiring and debugging, I'd expect.

I'll post lots of pics as that starts to come together!