Arcade cabinet art suggestions

[avdwal]

Hi there, almost 2 years ago I made my own Arcade cabinet.
Big thanks to Koenigs.dk for his build drawings and to EMDB (Retrocade) amongst others for their suggestions and help.

- I made little changes to the Koenigs design, I made the cabinet a bit (5 or 6 cm) heigher.
- Unfortunately thanks to my impatience and not thinking things over, I build the cabinet with 15mm MDF (less heavy) and without t-molding. Now you can find colours for 15mm, but not 2 years ago.
- I used a decoupeer saw, so the edges of the cabinet where not very straight. Also the second sidepart was not exactly the same. Now I would have used a copy bit with my new router, but then I did not have it. I just sanded the edges by hand, over and over to get them alike
- At first I used cheap primer paint, stupid mistake
- After this I used shining black paint, also stupid mistake

Since then, I have improved little things:
- replaced the monitor with a wide viewing angle 20/21 inch IPS 1600*1200 NEC Multisync, like it so much more than the wide standard monitors. Now I can see the screen nicely even if I sit on a chair in front of the cabinet.
- replaced the first car amplifier, one channel sometimes fell out.
- recently placed a PS2 trackball in the control panel. Very nice for Spotify and Golf games and occasional browsing on internet.
- placed a BIG subwoofer from JBL in the cabinet, sounds great!
- placed a little volume control in between the mini jack audio out and amplifier audio in
- placed 2 usb sockets in front of the cabinet. Since there is permanently a wifi dongle in one of them, I should have made the socket somewhere else. It does not look nice.
- replaced the Core2duo with a i5 quad-core with SSD and 8GB memory and a Geforce 745 video card. Startup Win10 in seconds!

Recently I replaced the control panel
- I routed space for the joysticks so they are a little bit 'inside' the MDF
- I also routed space for the trackball. Unfortunately I made the circle for the trackball not entirely perfect round, but will change this. I still have three MDF control panel plates available.

Usage cabinet
- I use the cabinet every day now. Since the trackball I use it as a JukeBox all the time.
- So Spotify is the most used app, I am so into music and the sound is decent. I want to improve the sound nevertheless, maybe by making the subwoofer more integrated with the cabinet.
- Also I discovered Visual Pinball, therefore I placed two side buttons on every side. I play it a lot.
- PC game 2003: Microsoft Links 2003. This performs perfectly on this system. Addictive game for me.
- Mame: msPacman, Track n Field, Ghouls'n Ghosts (World) mostly, but also lots of others.
- Visual Pinball: Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars etc.
- and some other consoles, but I rarely use them
- Despite all comments and criticism I still use the frontend Maximus Arcade. I only need to resize the frontend images to the 1600x1200 resolution.

Art
- I am making drawings in Inkscape but cannot find a nice control panel design that is not boring and does fit the entire cabinet and marquee and green t-molding.
- Please look below, this is the idea. I first have to repaint the entire cabinet to matte black paint.
- I want polycarbonate 3M on the control panel, because this way I do not need an extra layer of plexiglass on it. @Redwood maybe.
- I am thinking of a kickplate of aluminium, also some vent wholes. But I do not want to make the sound quality of the subwoofer worse.



Question: What kind of art design of the control panel fits the current cabinet best in your opinion? Maybe I should just use a black matte control panel?
All input very welcome!

[Mike A]

If you are really into music then build some speaker cabinets from scratch. They will sound much better than speakers mounted inside an arcade cabinet. You can just run speaker cables from your cabinet to the speakers.

[avdwal]

If you are really into music then build some speaker cabinets from scratch. They will sound much better than speakers mounted inside an arcade cabinet. You can just run speaker cables from your cabinet to the speakers.

Well, the sound is good enough right now. I have found a nice balance between the subwoofer and the car speakers. The subwoofer is mono connected on the stereo 2.0 amplifier.
But I want it all on one arcade cabinet. I do not have room for a mancave, otherwise I would have build a virtual pinball machine for sure.

[Gilrock]

Artwork is a tough thing to give advice on.  Its gotta be what you want.  I spent a lot of time on control panel artwork that I ended up not using and I ultimately went with a generic design I drew that looks like a weave/carbon fiber type look.  There is a sticky thread in the artwork section talking about how typically control panels lean more towards informational for the user and then the more fancy art goes on the sides.

By the way what did you not like about the glossy black?  I ask because I just painted my control panel base glossy mainly cause I was watching Ond's video where he spends an hour sanding with 2000 grit to get a mirror finish.  I didn't sand that much but I got a pretty nice mirror finish and was trying to decide if I'd really want that everywhere else.  My sides will be fully covered with art so its really the front base I'd be having to decide on.

[avdwal]

I agree. I will keep the control panel very plain dark with only the button legenda on it.
I sanded the control panel and the kickplate and used 'zijdeglans' (between matte and shining) black and the result is much better now. I will show some pictures later on.

[killallhumans]

Hello,

Here ya go...
Start with your base colour. Look at your marquee. Use background colour of that.
Next, some border outlines. Cut some long strips of paper and lay them along outside edges.
Move them inward until it looks right to you (~12mm maybe). Select biggest volume of
colour from marquee. If it is same as background, choose complementary colour of that.
Mask and paint your stripes. Add some theme features, like tufts of grass, in random unused
areas. Not too many, and groupings of odd numbers are pleasing to the eyes. Coat with clear
paint to prevent moisture or chipping damage. Allow paint to dry (breath) for at least one full
week. Top with plexi for long life. You're done.
- David C