Monochromatic

[surtr]

Not really an announcement as the project is more or less completed, but here's mine:

My daughter and I did this one in 2017 -- she was starting shop class and was nervous about it as her best friend fed her hand into a band saw in shop class the prior year (no permanent damage luckily!), so this was my excuse to build a cabinet and get my daughter a basic knowledge of power tools.



Details:
- Cab build with 1/2" plywood and #2064 smoked 1/8" plexi
- 22" westinghouse LED TV.  Does not power on automatically so I rigged up an old USB-UIRT with a batch script to power this on when windows starts
- PC hardware: AMD A-series CPU, supporting motherboard PSU and ram.  Onboard graphics
- GPWiz-40 controller from GroovyGameGear -- the wiring kit was the best money I spent on this build
- Omni-2 joysticks and Arcade PRIME buttons with soft-touch microswitches, also from GGG
- single slot coin door from x-arcade
- frontend: Maximus Arcade

I'll see if I can find any in-progress pics if there is interest, but this is the finished product.  We're currently redoing the control panel -- adding a spinner and 2 trackballs -- Marble Madness baby!

[yotsuya]

That’s cool you built it together. But what’s going on with the wall?

[surtr]

Snowflakes.  My kids decorated for Christmas...

[javeryh]

Very clean.  What kind of screen do you have in there?  What front-end are you using?  Any videos of it in action?  Let's see some details!

[surtr]

Very clean.  What kind of screen do you have in there?  What front-end are you using?  Any videos of it in action?  Let's see some details!

Thanks!  The screen is a 22" westinghouse LED TV (80 bucks from wal mart).  Frontend is Maximus Arcade.  I'll snag some action shots and post em up.

[surtr]

Sorry, didn't get a chance to get any action shots last night, but I added some details to the post.  Will get some action shots tonight.  I'd talk trash and say I'll get an action shot of me beating y'all's scores at Circus Charlie, but I suck too bad at that game to even attempt the trash talk...

[Zeosstud]

I like it.. Simple and effective..

Enjoy

[paigeoliver]

Hopefully I fix the picture.

Pre-fix. My reviews are mostly negative because I want to make sure people who read them don't repeat mistakes they saw on the internet.

Good.

#1. Sleek looking.
#2. Great detail work.
#3. Excellent panel layout.

Bad.

#1. Blank black marquee.
#2. No control panel overlay (my main cabinet has the same issue).
#3. Substandard wood. Full size cabinets are 3/4", so are minis, bartops and all other arcade cabinets.
#4. Alien control panel. You built everything from scratch, yet for some reason the control panel is the separate entity that looks like it was forced onto the cabinet. It is wider than the cabinet to no utility since it doesn't use the space. It needlessly overhangs the base in every direction as Mame cab builders love to do but real gamemakers never do as that just makes the cabinet easier to damage.
#5. The control panel a second time. Why is this a separate complex component and not a piece of wood riding between the rails?
$6. The control panel a 3rd time. Really? Cheap chinese controls when you put the rest of it together so nicely. Really? Couldn't drop $30 for the real thing, had to do it for $15?

[surtr]

Pre-fix. My reviews are mostly negative because I want to make sure people who read them don't repeat mistakes they saw on the internet.

Thanks for fixing the pic.

We went with 1/2" plywood as we wanted to save some weight and bulk.  I get that is it not authentic, but obviously authenticity was not our goal here...  The 1/2 plywood is plenty sturdy and I think looks pretty good on a slim build like this.

The marquee is not plain black -- it is a black&white maze behind smoked plexi with color changing LEDs behind.  We do need to reprint the marquee and add LEDs to improve the backlighting.  I could not get it to show up decently in the photos but it looks kinda cool in person.

Our thinking on the control panel was that we would build several and swap them in/out.  Thus the separate entity.  We made it slightly wider than the cabinet to add a couple of inches extra space between the players -- just makes it more comfortable to play.  After we finished what you see in the pic above, we decided we didn't want to store multiple CPs and just crammed all the controls onto a single CP -- 2 joysticks, 2 2" trackballs and buttons galore -- into a single panel (that's not the one shown, we actually just finished the CP rebuild this weekend).  There is no way that all would have fit on a slightly narrower CP.  I get you don't like the look, but we are happy with it. 

I don't get the criticism of the controls;  I bought what I believe to be high quality controls from GroovyGameGear -- gpwiz-40 controller, omni-2 joysticks, etc;  Am I missing something here?

The fact that you don't like aspects of a cabinet does not classify them as "mistakes" for others to be steered away from.  Build what you want...

[paigeoliver]

Ok, I misidentified the joysticks. Usually when you see the Asian bolt pattern on sticks and all one color it is one of those el-cheapo Chinese ebay control set specials.

[Ond]

The bold plain white with black trim is cool.  It makes me think of 2001 a space odyssey.