Hi,
this is my first post on this forum so hello everybody.
Grew up in Germany with a lot of Arcade Games in the 80s until they suddenly all disappeared. Got banned into 18+ areas I think, don't really know, but in my memory they were just gone all of a sudden. But the fascination remained. Phoenix...Galaxian...Scramble...Zaxxon...later Rampage and Double Dragon... (at that time the British 5-pence coin matched exactly the German 1 DM coin in seize and weight, but was only worth 15 Pfennig. So during the school exchange to London we went to a bank and brought hundreds of them back home. Some used them for cigarettes, we for Double Dragon. For a while we were rich...)
Years later with a little more money and my own man cave I thought about buying one of these old machines. Would that be cool... But I was shocked about the high prices on ebay and elsewhere and wasn't sure if I could keep these old things running. Don't know much about electronics. But then there was this MAME-thing I had never heard of before, and people building their own cabinets!
And a lot of them no professionals writing 'If I can build it everybody can...' That helped because I had never done something that big and complex before and wasn't sure if it was possible. So the idea grew, I read a lot...a LOT...about other projects and started planning. That's when I stumbled over this forum here, must be over 2 yearts ago, and found it a true treasure chest of knowledge. No matter what idea...silly question...problem...someone had written about it and shared it. Many of you have helped me a lot in this, unknowingly, so I wanted to thank you, a big thanks.
I have to admit "Die Spielekiste" (literally "Gaming Box", named by my children) is already working by now, not yet totally finished as artwork and plexiglass are still missing, but you can play on it. My children love it, I think it's the greatest thing in the world and my wife thinks I'm crazy. So it's not really a project announcement but rather a story of the building process, but I wanted to share the experience nevertheless.
The plan was to build a classic upright cabinet made from MDF with a used LCD screen, some used Mini PC with an i5, some old graphics card and a used 2.0 or 2.1 PC speaker system. For the CP I wanted a 2-Player 6 button layout with a trackball for Missile Command. (Learned about all the other great TB-controlled games only later.). For the artwork I had some ideas but nothing definitively decided...still don't have. But I knew I wanted a coin door. A real working one. Wanted to hear the sound of the falling coin again, and - for the ultimate nostalgia - wanted it to work with D-Mark.
For the screen I found a used Dell 2709W. It has 27" and was one of the few monitors still available in 16:10. So it has a relatively big vertical size of 36,3cm (14,3"), which comes close to the old vertical classics which I also wanted to play. A good compromise as I thought, not too big but still ok for the vertical games. Other ideas included a hinged openable CP and a drawer for keyboard and mouse.
So much for the initial thoughts. The plans I did with sketchup...was a bit complicated in the beginning but after some time all the drawing and changing and experimenting became a lot of fun. The measurement of the cabinet was based on Koenigs Project MAME (
http://koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepprojectmame.htm), adapted to the size of the monitor and me.