I figure I've invested enough into this project to assume I'll follow it through to completion now, so here goes!
This project has been a long time coming, so I'll start with a tiny bit of history on how I got to where I am today.
I've been off and on wanting to build a MAME cabinet essentially since the MAME project started, but I never felt like I had the time, or money to do it. In late 2013, early 2014 I actually went so far as to buy a joystick, some buttons and a mini-PAC.
Here's the best picture I can find of my first attempt at a control panel
Sorry for the horrible picture, but I never thought I would have a need to reference the first control panel prototype I'd put together.
If I remember correctly, I think I used the box the joystick and buttons came in to house the control panel. You can't tell in the picture, but the button layout is a 6 button layout based on one of the layouts from slagcoin. I think it's this one, cut down to 6 buttons:
The buttons were CLASSX buttons from groovygamegear.com, using the true-leaf switches, and the joystick was a Zippyy.
Then life happened and the project ended up on hold for about 4 years (btw, my son just turned 4, coincidence?)
I actually really liked the 6-button layout, and the joystick was fine, but a bit clicky (I went with really soft switches so I couldn't really feel the click, but I could always hear it, which bugged me.) Originally, I had gone a bit nuts and wanted to try to find a way to support as many of the games emulated by MAME as possible and was planning some insane 4-player, 7-button per player with 1 or 2 dedicated 4-way joysticks, and a spinner and a trackball and was trying to figure out how to get driving games to work and... it would have been just horrible.
I also learned that while my little mocked up control panel worked fine for me, for the layout and how it functioned, a lot of other people that would try it were confused by the controls, and even more so, confused by the tens of thousands of games available to choose from (see, those 4 years weren't just me sitting on my hands, they were just an extended playtesting session, right...)
A couple of months ago I got the bug to start going after building the MAME cabinet again, and took a look at what had changed with MAME in the last 4 years, and found that MAME and MESS had merged, pushing the number of available emulated machines north of 34k machines, including pinball, slot machines and a bunch of old handheld games, which just made the whole thing seem even more ridiculous to try to make a fun experience out of playing all of those games.
I took a look at why I wanted to build the MAME machine, and what I really wanted out of it, and realized that the games I really wanted to play were games built during the golden era of arcade games, roughly 1978 through 1986. I also mostly wanted to play 2-way and 4-way joystick games, and just didn't want a terribly messy control panel, so I decided to nix spinner and trackball games as well. Also, forget anything that isn't an arcade game, so I trimmed out all of the pinball, casino, etc. games, which left me with a much more trim 380-ish games, which I've slowly been cutting back even further (I think I'm down to around 320, and am playing through as many as I can to get rid of anything I don't want to keep.)
After looking at various period-accurate arcade cabinets, I decided that I really like the shape of the defender cabinet. I'm using the template from here:
https://www.classicarcadecabinets.com/defender.htmlAt first I was a frustrated by the fact that the page has the huge warning about the plans potentially being inaccurate, and other websites were actually pretty light on details on the shape and build of the original defender cabinet, but 1500points helped talk me down. I also ended up comparing the dimensions on the sketchup file from here:
http://www.arcaderestoration.com/Articles/1/Restoration+Data/36/Defender+Dimensions.aspx to the dimensions on the classicarcadecabinets cad files, and they're both pretty close, despite having been made by two different people, so I figure I'll be close enough.
I don't have as ready-access as I used to have to plotter printers, but I wanted to still print out the template from classicarcadecabinets for the defender cabinet, so I ended up using acrobat to do a multi-page print of the template, then spent an hour taping it together. The lines are pretty fine, but you can kind of make them out:
Acrobat has settings for adding alignment marks, and it actually worked out pretty well. I did screw up somewhere in the last 2-3 rows of panels and accidentally ended up narrowing the whole thing about 1/4-inch, but I'll fix that when I'm actually cutting out the wood, I just wanted the template printed out to help guide me in the right direction.
That left me with the control panel. I knew I wanted to simplify my original plan, but wasn't quite sure how yet, because I didn't really want to go with the 6-buttons per player setup that I originally had, because it confused people trying to play my original setup. I'd discovered a barcade had opened up in my area and decided to take a trip there for a bit of inspiration, and boy, inspiration I got. When I was there, I realized that the actual defender CP layout essentially covered almost all of the 4-way joystick, single player (or at least not two player simultaneous) games that I was trying to jam into my arcade cabinet. Who would have thought that a defender control panel would be a good control panel for a defender style cabinet!
OK, it won't be exactly the defender control panel, I'm actually going for one of the multi-williams style layouts based on the defender control panel, specifically this one:
https://www.thisoldgame.com/multicade-art/mult-williams-defender-versionI made another control panel prototype based on one of the multi-williams layouts from escapepodonline.com:
You'll notice I only have a single joystick currently in the prototype, there will be a second joystick in the final control panel, I only have one to put in the prototype for now. I also wanted to move the hyperspace button back to the bottom middle of the control panel, which is why I ultimately decided on the one from thisoldgame instead. I actually feel a bit bad not buying the CP overlay from escapepodonline.com, because they've been really awesome to work with through email. I'm still buying a marquee from them though, so that's something.
I've decided to buy all the artwork now, before cutting out a single piece of wood, essentially to use as a sanity check, so I can make sure that I'm cutting the wood to the right sizes. I'm getting stencils from thisoldgame, and also decided to buy the monitor bezel from them as well. I've also ordered a marquee from escapepodonline (I'm oddly a bit nervous on how it's going to print out, so I'll also be keeping my eye out for an original marquee in good condition on ebay.) I've also got an appropriately sized coin door coming, not the original pinball style door, I'll leave those to people restoring actual defender games (and people with deeper pockets.)
I've also ordered a Dominux8 with 4-way restricter from GGG, along with some differently colored buttons to match the defender layout. I'm really excited about the new joystick, the zippyy has been nice, but doesn't feel like an old school, early 80s joystick to me. Assuming I like the Dominux, I'll be ordering a second one, but I wanted to get just a single one to start to make sure I actually like it.
I'm vaguely keeping my eyes open for a 19-inch CRT as well, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll likely settle for an LSD screen an a scan line generator.
For anyone that cares about such things, I'm running AttractMode for my frontend in ubuntu server. I forget why, now, but I compiled attractmode and mame myself because I wasn't happy with the versions from the apt repositories (guessing I just wanted to get rid of the nag screens in MAME, but I can't remember for sure why I compiled attractmode myself.) I had a really nice write-up on getting the whole thing running smoothly in ubuntu server, but I think I accidentally deleted it somewhere down the line, or just misfiled it somewhere on my computer. If I find my write-up again I'll publish it here, it covered a lot of little tricky things you needed to do to get it working correctly, and I overall like the way it runs better than what I had been able to do in Windows.
The computer I setup back in 2014 was a 1st gen intel mac mini, but I'm now using some small form factor dell or something that I picked up cheap.
I saw some delivery notifications a bit earlier today, so I'm guessing some of my goodies have shown up, so I'll post on what came in the mail later.
I'm also considering keeping a running total on money spent, but that also scares me a bit too. If anyone is interested in seeing the running total, let me know, it might help influence my decision.
Oh! Because it's pretty important, I have full buy-in from the spouse on this project as well! I don't think I have her any hard numbers, but I've at least indicated this will be a spendy project, and she's fine with that.