BSG Arcade Build

[mjwolfe]

So, with the whole stay at home orders my son suggested that we do a project together. Let's build an arcade cabinet. It sounded like a great idea. I'm pretty handy at woodworking, tools, electronics so it should be fun. But having not done it before, I need to do lots of research to figure out want I want since I get pretty picky. I've been checking out every site I can find. I found this forum and saw a lot of different things that people have done. I found vendor sites. I saw all of the cool artwork and themes people had used. We talked about using our favorite game as a theme, but we couldn't agree on any one particular one, and it didn't seem like we were thrilled with trying to use all of them. My son thought it would be weird playing a game and having the cabinet full of art from other games. In the end, we agreed to use a TV show theme since there's a lot of good ones we liked. After tossing a bunch of ideas around, we ended up agreeing on one of our favorite Sci-Fi TV shows of all time, Battlestar Galactica. One decision down, hundreds to go.

Looking around, I saw lots of things I liked. Servo Stick joysticks from Ultimarc and using a large LCD monitor seem like things I want to do. Then, I found the PixelCade marquee (pixelcade.org)! It seems really cool. So, the cabinet will need to be sized for a 32" IPS LCD monitor and the P6 Pixelcade(I'm not fond of going smaller when something bigger and better is available. The P6 is the biggest and it's just about the same width as a 32" monitor).

[mjwolfe]

We started at retromash.com looking over the cabinet silhouettes of the main arcade machines. I'd never heard of the Bally Midway game Tapper, but it had an outline that we liked. I took a screen shot and imported it to Microsoft Visio and blew it up and traced the outline with line segments so that I could work with it. It looked like it would have good support for a control panel that wasn't integrated into the cabinet's shape but was built as a separate unit that attached to the cabinet. This would allow the control panel layout to extend wider than the 31 inch width of the cabinet that was dictated by the monitor and Pixelcade widths. That would give us a chance to get started without having a finalized layout of the control panel. We did, however, set up a flat surface where we could adjust the height to decide how high off the ground that we wanted the control panel. We settled on 37 inches to the top of the front of the control panel. We also decided on a 5 degree slope from the front of the control panel to the back to have less strain on the wrists while playing.

I built a new PC last year and my old one was still sitting in the garage, so we thought it would be suitable for the build. I decided that since it was going to be inside the arcade cabinet, that we didn't need to use the case from the PC. I wanted to keep it for another PC build later. We would just mount the PC inside the cabinet on a board at the bottom. I found an acrylic motherboard mount and attached it to an oak shelf from an old entertainment center I had built years ago. That way, I could easily remove the motherboard if we ever need to work on it outside the arcade cabinet.



Knowing how much space the PC would need, I was able to adjust the lengths of the cabinet outline in Visio. It looked appealing, so another decision made.



I saw that a number of people used Sketchup to design their cabinets. I tried for a number of hours to get the hang of using it and it just took so much time for little results. My son tried too and he at least got a working 3d view of the cabinet:



I've always been able to visualize and make 3d objects in 2d, so I will stick with Visio since I'm already fluent.

I always tend to over-engineer the things I build, so the first decision looking at the cabinet outline was that I wasn't just going to make the cabinet out of the two side panels and attach everything to them. I would build a structure and attach the side panels to that at the end. More strength to the cabinet in all three directions. We used all plywood, no MDF. There'll be no screws visible from the outside of the cabinet and the pieces will be built as modules that can be attached and removed if we need to.  The lower section of the cabinet looked like a simple rectangle, so we started there. We picked out four heavy-duty casters that have built in leveling with a twist dial when the wheels aren't needed. The four wheels let it roll just like the latest cool suitcases. We wanted a built-in keyboard tray that would pretty much disappear when it wasn't needed. It looked sort of like a bookcase without the shelves, but needed a small door at the front and the back so that we could access the leveling dials on the casters when we need to move the machine. That all ends up looking like this:






In between building the structure, I started thinking about the control panel. When I saw a few of the acrylic LED-lit control panels, I was sold on that approach. Some of our favorite games were Tempest, Centipede and Ms. Pac-Man. Therefore, a trackball and spinner were mandatory. I couldn't figure out whether I liked the spinner on the left of the buttons better or the reverse and so that we could also show off Pong, the choice became two spinners. For the joysticks, 8-way always caused me trouble with Ms. Pac-Man, so we also picked out Ultimarc ServoSticks so they could automatically switch to 4 or 8-way for each game. We figured it'd be unlikely we'd have four players at once, so 2-player would be enough for us.

Next, I bought a few of each of the different buttons we thought were possible candidates that we'd like, the Ultimarc trackball, spinners and servosticks and one of each of the main led controllers to see what worked for us. We got the buttons with different switches so that we could try those out too. I made them into a temporary frame so we could play around:



Using this it was easy to pick what we wanted. Each player would have the 7-button layout next to the joystick with the trackball in the middle. I picked the "Clustered layout with space between rows" from http://slagcoin.com/joystick/layout.html. Above those would be the two spinners with two buttons each, one to the right and the other to the left. That row would also have Player 1 and Player 2 start buttons and Exit and Pause buttons. All other administrative functions would be from the keyboard so that normal players couldn't mess with the settings. The SpectraLite buttons from GroovyGameGear with the clear ring, black plungers, helio9 RGB LEDs and the Standard Soft Touch sub-20 gram switch for the main controls. The LEDWiz was best for the trackball lighting, but flickered too much at lower intensities for the buttons. The PACLED64 didn't have as high a current capability as the LEDWiz, but it was bright enough for us and didn't have the bad flicker at lower intensities. The PACLED64 would be used at 5V for the buttons and the LEDWiz at 12V would be used for the trackball and the control panel lighting.

Next, we built a mockup of the control panel top out of 1/2 inch plywood and used it to size the control panel box.



We made the box out of 3/4 inch plywood for the bottom and 1/2 inch plywood for the sides. We made the bottom of the control panel box extend into the cabinet for support and to provide access for wiring, etc. We also started the black paint job using Behr Marquee from Home Depot. It's paint and primer in one and I've used it for painting inside the house before so I figured it would save us time by needing fewer coats. Then, we cut a 3/4 inch plywood piece for the front kick panel and cut in a coin door.





The box design for our base really separates the cabinet into a lower compartment and an upper compartment. The small circular holes in the back top of the base cabinet allow for cabling to get between the compartments and the larger circular holes are for exhaust fans. There will eventually be two 4-pin PWM fans that bring cool air into the lower compartment, two between compartments to pull warm air up out of the lower compartment into the upper compartment and two at the back top of the cabinet to exhaust the warm air out of the cabinet. The six fans will be connected to fan headers on the motherboard so that it can monitor and control the speed of the fans based on the temps on the motherboard.

More later...

[javeryh]

Nice start.  That plywood sure looks expensive!

Your control panel seems kind of wide to me but no turning back now I guess.  You do still have time to change the button layout though - they look way too far apart.  Go to slagcoin.com and you can print templates with proper spacing for every layout imaginable.  "Proper" is relative since it's all personal to what you like but it's at least a good reference point.

Why do you have 10(!) buttons across the top of the control panel?  In my experience, you only need a couple.  P1 Start, P2 Start, Exit, Coin and maybe Pause.  You have a coin door so you don't even need a dedicated coin button (and if you don't want to deal with quarters all of the time you can make the coin returns act as your "coin" button.  There's something about having to reach down and insert a coin (or press the return) before playing.  Pause is optional but I always include it because my house is crazy and people are always interrupting each other.

I also wish you didn't do through the trouble of the keyboard drawer - it's fine but a lot of people are skipping that these days because a wireless keyboard is super easy to store inside the cabinet.  Honestly, if you pull out the keyboard more than a couple of times per year for any reason I'd be surprised.  Could have saved the headache of making the drawer work just right although you look like you know what you are doing in the shop so probably no big deal...

I'll be following your thread - keep the pics coming!   

[mjwolfe]

I didn't consider the plywood that expensive. A 4 x 8 sheet at Home Depot is $53 vs $30 for the MDF. So, even with needing three sheets it's only an extra $70. I thought it was worth it for how much easier it is to work with.

I did take the layout of the buttons from slagcoin.com. They just look farther apart I guess because the circle I drew was the size of the opening that would have to be drilled, not the size of the buttons themselves. The second row doesn't have 10 buttons. The two on the left are P1 Start and P2 Start. The two on the right are Exit and Pause. i felt those two were necessary since I too get interrupted a lot.

In the middle are the two spinners (which use the same size hole as a button) and each spinner has a button 1 and button 2. One is right handed since I use my right hand for the spinner and left for its associated two buttons and my son prefers to use his left hand for the spinner and his right for B1 and B2. Then, we can also use both spinners to play Pong. We felt it was better to use the buttons next to the spinner than to have to use the buttons in the joystick area since one hand would be way up the control panel and the other would be way down toward the front. The spacing is a little wide so that we could both comfortably stand side by side when playing two player and also so that the joysticks and trackball didn't get in the way of using the spinners and their buttons.

The keyboard tray was very easy to add and with the control panel overhang, it's barely even noticeable. I felt like I'd be using it often enough to keep Windows and virus protection up-to-date and I used the wired keyboard and marble mouse that I already had. I also already had the drawer slides and had just done the little flip up front piece for the caster access so it was just another one of the same.

[Mike A]

Plywood was the right choice.
 

[mjwolfe]

Next up, was figuring out the modules that would hold the speakers and the Pixelcade marquee. I looked around for the L-shaped marquee mounts that lots of builds used and couldn't fins any that went as wide as 31 inches. I figured instead, I would cut a groove in the top edge of the speaker panel to hold the 1/8 inch smoked plexiglass front piece of the pixelcade and then a similar groove to hold the top of the plexiglass. In order to make it removable to get access to the pixelcade if needed, the top panel would be in two pieces - one removable and one fixed. I also wanted the speakers to have an enclosure behind them to focus the sound out of the cabinet instead of using the whole cabinet as their enclosure. So, I used visio to figure out the sizes of the top panels, speaker enclosure and monitor bezels.



For the speakers, I went to the Cruthfield site looking for some good car speakers. The largest ones that my panel could fit were 5 x 7, so I checked out the specs and found one inexpensive set that was on sale and had frequency response down to 35 Hz. I figured that would be good enough that I could avoid trying to put a subwoofer in place. They were only $79 and i had a $10 credit from the last time I bought there, so only really $69. I found an audio amplifier to drive them off of Amazon for $50 - a Pyle 2X120 Watt Home Audio Power Amplifier - PTAU45. I had looked at all of the computer speaker sets, but found they were either cheap crap or else very expensive, so I figured this was a nice middle of the road approach to good sound.

I started building the speaker enclosure and the Pixelcade pieces and realized I'd need to connect them together to make sure that the Pixelcade was held vertically straight to the rest of the cabinet and had the right spacing to hold the weight in the two 1/8 inch grooves. So I glued and screwed them together.

For all of the construction, I purchased a new 10" 90 tooth plywood blade for my radial arm saw and a 7" 40 tooth blade for the circular saw. My current dado-blade would come in handy for gluing some of the pieces together and the radial arm saw is good at ripping the sides of pieces especially when they need to be at 45 degrees or 22 1/2 or 5 degrees for the control panel. The 90 tooth blade has a very thin kerf, but I did find that one of my old blades had teeth that were exactly 1/8 inch wide, so cutting the grooves for the pixelcade were as easy as ripping both pieces but with the depth set properly. I started with the speaker enclosure:



Then the top and back top panels.




Next, was seeing how they test fit together with the Pixelcade front acrylic.



Then measuring and cutting the exact sizes of support pieces and gluing them together so that they now work as one unit.




I used 1/2 inch plywood to make the monitor bezel so that it would be pretty thin. but still strong enough to hold a piece of glass between the players and the monitor. I did a plunge cut with the circular saw to get nice straight cuts for taking out the center of the bezel and finished those cuts with a hacksaw blade used separately from the hacksaw. I have a little handle that can attach to the blade so that you don't hold it with your bare hand. With just a little bit of sanding with a file, you can't tell that the hacksaw cuts are any different than the circular saw cuts. Please excuse the mess in the garage, but my son moved back in with us from being away at college for a few years and he brought all his stuff from his apartment with him and there was nowhere else to put all of it but in the garage. We just had to really work around all of it while doing the construction.



Finally, we were ready to cut the side panels, but because all of the pieces weren't perfectly exactly square in all three dimensions, we cut the side panels as large rectangles just slightly bigger than they would need to be and then clamped them to the sides of the base cabinet and clamped the monitor bezel and top module in place then traced the proper outline onto the side panels so that we would have a nice 1/2 inch overlap everywhere except for the monitor bezel where we went with a 1 inch overlap so that it felt a little more recessed.

[mjwolfe]

At this point, we started painting. We sanded the pieces quite a bit before starting the painting. I tried doing some heavy sanding after the first coat and it made quite a mess, but took off most of the paint. So we resorted to just light touch up sanding after each coat. This part is really tedious. After making great progress doing the woodworking, it seemed like made very little progress painting. With a foam roller and the Behr paint, we could finish applying a coat of paint in just a few hours and then it's wait for a day while it dries. I'm just not that patient.

So, in the meantime, I'm reading at GameOnGrafix about how to prepare the artwork and apply the vinyl and I see a cautionary note that people were having trouble using paint with stain-blocking agents in it like from Behr. So I go check and sure enough the Behr Marquee paint says exactly the same wording as the cautionary note. so scramble. What should we do. I go back to Home Depot and they have almost no types of paint without the stain blocking. Eventually they find one in eggshell that we can use. Since we had already done two coats on all the pieces, we didn't want to strip it and start over, so we used the new paint on the pieces that would have artwork (the two side panels and the front kick plate) and continued to use the stain-blocking paint on the other pieces. We added four more coats (for a total of six) with the new paint to be sure that there would be enough to allow the artwork to stick properly. We did one more coat (three total) for the other pieces.

The painting turned out differently than I expected. From doing most of my painting in the past on walls inside the house, I expected the paint to have a really smooth finish. I don't know if it was the foam roller or what, but no matter how well we sanded, the paint for the cabinet always seemed to have a texture to it. Oh well, after a time, I came to accept that's what it would feel like instead of being ultra smooth.






With everything painted (it took over a week), we could finally put all of the pieces together that we had so far.







I was at Lowes getting some screws when I saw that one of their associates was by the glass cutting machine. I knew we needed a piece of glass to put in the bezel and they had a sheet for $13 and free cutting. I bought it and gave the associate the dimensions and took it home with me. We put it in using mirror holder brackets and attached it to the back of the bezel as you can see in the picture above. Unfortunately at about a 1/16 inch thick or something, every time we even touched the cabinet you could hear the glass making strange noises. It seemed to sound like it was just about to break. After reading some more about glass, I realized that for safety's sake, that the glass needed to be tempered glass. I looked online and it seemed to be very expensive to get it cut to my dimensions. One popular online place wanted $150 to ship to me from Texas. After calling around, I found a local place that would get a piece overnight for $63. So, I went with 3/16" and I'm very glad I did. It's quite a bit heavier, but it never makes any strange sounds and I feel like the machine is much safer.

[mjwolfe]

On to the control panel acrylic. The plan was to use 1/2 inch clear acrylic sheet, then attach the control panel artwork printed on translucent film then place 1/4 inch clear acrylic on top to protect the artwork. I'd use RGB LED lighting under the 1/2 inch acrylic to light up portions of the control panel like the Battlestar Galactica logo and some of the various ships from the show. As I saw examples of people cutting the holes for all of their buttons, joysticks, trackballs, spinners, etc. I realized that the chances of drilling all of those holes in the exact position without messing up or scratching the pieces with the drill bit or while sanding the holes was unlikely. Especially as easily as I saw some acrylic crack while being drilled. I also noticed that I didn't see much acrylic at Home Depot or Lowes. As I checked around, I found that with all of the businesses needing to put up clear acrylic to shield their cashiers and other workers from people because of COVID-19, there has become a big run on clear acrylic. It has become both expensive and hard to find. While I was looking around the internet, I became aware of laser cutting services. I figured that the laser cutter wouldn't make the mistakes that I would. Now to figure out how to specify what I want for the laser cutter. It turns out they need a vector graphics file and I didn't have any of the programs that make them. I found that I could do a 7-day free trial of Adobe Illustrator. It was fairly easy to learn and so I did my panel layout in AI using millimeters for the dimensions (lots of time spent converting inches to mm on the calculator). It ended up looking like this:



Then I had to find a provider who could cut it. I checked out a lot of places. I looked at as many online providers as I could. They were either really expensive, or the 36 inch width was just larger than the maximum size they could cut or else they couldn't get clear acrylic easily either. One place could could it in France and ship it to me for a total of $350. No  thanks. Living in Southern California, I figured LA might have some local providers. I started calling around. Some said they couldn't get the acrylic, but their prices were pretty good once they could get the acrylic. I was starting to get disappointed, when I happened to call a little plastic shop called Solter Plastics and they said they could do it. $60 for the top piece and $150 for the thicker piece. A bit pricey, but given the run on acrylic I didn't figure I had much of a choice. They had a few issues with their machines, so I had to end up waiting a week or so for the 1/2 inch piece, but I got the 1/4 inch piece and I could go there and pick it up.

My son and I had been scouring the internet looking for all of the high-res images we could find from both the old series and new series of Battlestar Galactica. My older son happened to come visit with his girlfriend (she's a graphics artist) and we were showing them what we'd been working on. She graciously offered to help and work on the artwork for us. We gave her all of the images we liked and told her what parts we liked and about three days after they went home, she sent us the first draft of the artwork. It was fantastic! Being the perfectionists that we are, we still gave her numerous suggestions and she did six pretty quick turnarounds addressing all of our issues.

The control panel looked great and I merged her artwork with all of the control layouts in AI. I added outlines of the control knobs on top and the joysticks and trackball underneath so I could see if the lighting from underneath or the controls on top would obstruct the view of artwork elements. We did end up needing to move some things around a little bit. We used the trackball at the exact center of a galaxy, so it would look like it was the galaxy's bright core. It was really shaping up:



Along with the control panel art, we also got a taste of the side panel art. So here's the complete set for the BSG theme. The red line represents the outline of the control panel or the side panels showing the amount extra that would be trimmed when attached to the cabinet.



For the under control panel LED lighting, I decided to create one zone each for the following areas: BSG logo, Vipers, Galactica, Ceylon Raider, Trackball, Galaxy, Ceylon Base Stars and the cool nebula and stars at the right edge of the control panel. Each zone could be lit separately with any of the RGB colors.

I sent the artwork to GameOnGrafix.com. They were fast and did a very good job. The control panel art was printed on the same film material as a marquee so it could be backlit and the sides were the standard 3M vinyl with the lustre finish. I used the control panel film and started experimenting with how to light it. I had bought some individual RGB LEDs some time ago and tried using them. I wired them up on a prototyping board with current limiting resistors and connected them to the LEDWiz at 12V then held the control panel art over them. These LEDs proved to be too much of a point source when they got too close to the film. You could see the individual LEDs as spots of light. The Red, Green and Blue colors of the LEDs also didn't blend well. You could actually see the individual colors weren't perfectly aligned and outside of the white center on the film from each LED were offset portions of the three colors. Those LEDs wouldn't work. I had also ordered some LED strip lights from Amazon to use on the back and bottom of the cabinet for mood backlighting. I cut off one segment (3 LEDs) of one of the strips and soldered it up to try it out.



If I positioned this strip between 1/2 inch and an inch below the artwork, it was about ideal. The light was still a little too focused and not evenly lit, however. I found solidapollo.com and they had an LED strip light diffuser that you can cut to size and it has adhesive to attach to the LED strip and it diffuses the light nicely. I've got the ideal lighting for the control panel now.

[mjwolfe]

Now to work on building the control panel itself. I noticed a lot of builds attach the control panel top piece to the box with euro hinges and attach the trackball and joysticks to the top or bottom of the control panel top. With the acrylic, i was worried about damaging it with so many mounting holes. There would be even more holes needed to mount the lighting in the spaces between the controls. I decided to mount the lighting, joysticks and trackball to a strip of 3/4 inch plywood then position the controls so that they would all line up exactly even with the underside of the acrylic top. The buttons and spinners would attach through the two acrylic pieces and serve to clamp them together. This control strip would be suspended to an inner sleeve at the same 5 degree angle as the acrylic top. The sleeve would fit exactly inside the walls of the control box. All I would need is to attach the bottom acrylic panel with a few screws and L brackets to the inner sleeve. The whole top/inner sleeve unit would then be able to slide into and out of the control box whenever we needed to access the controls or lighting as long as we made a wiring harness for the connections between the cabinet and the control panel (PC power, coin inputs and USB). The electronic boards (LEDWiz, two PacLED64s, ipac4, ServoStick controller and USB hub could all connect to the underside of the plywood strip holding the large controls. I modeled it in Visio:



It looked like this as I was fitting it to the inside of the control box:



Since I hadn't originally planned to do the sleeve, I lost a half inch all the way around the inside of the control panel box. That put the sleeve really close to a couple of the buttons and the left joystick frame, so I had to trim a bit out of the sleeve right at the top where the acrylic holding the buttons would attach. The dado blade and the radial arm saw came in handy for that. The trackball was mounted flush to the bottom plywood strip since it was the tallest control. The joysticks were mounted with very long screws that went through the plywood strip and would be fixed by nuts and lock washers from underneath and from on top. That way I could adjust the height of the joysticks by tightening or loosening the screws so that the joysticks were at the exact same height as the trackball. I had a digital micrometer that made adjusting the height pretty precise. Once at the right height, I could tighten the nuts to lock them in place.

Next, I fashioned lighting supports out of three pieces of 1/8 inch acrylic to attach the LED strips. They were shaped to fit between the controls at the locations where the lighting zones needed to be. They were attached to the same plywood strip as the controls, but only needed a few screws each to allow adjusting their height as well. I used the hidden under-mount threaded inserts that are often used with joysticks to attach the lighting supports.

I transferred the locations of the large controls to the plywood strip using painters tape on the acrylic top.









With that in place, I could now work on the control panel out of the cabinet and on my workbench.







The fun part then was adding in the lighting strips and testing them out. It took me about an hour to prepare the LEDs, strip and solder the wires just to get the LEDs under the logo working.



At that point, I went to Amazon and ordered a set of connectors that would just snap onto the LED strip at one end and to a four wire cable at the other end to make the process of interconnecting the lighting a lot faster. I used a total of 87 LEDs and I spread the zones evenly to keep the max current per chip on the LEDWiz to 500 ma. Each of the eight zones connect to three outputs on the LEDWiz and all of the LEDs in that zone are in parallel.





With the lighting in place and tested out it was now time to fit the acrylic top to the sleeve. We picked four mounting locations that would be easy to reach from the wiring access area at the back of the control panel and fitted four L-brackets to the sleeve. We placed the bottom acrylic panel on top of the sleeve and transferred the location of the four holes needed in the panel with a sharpie. We would use the same hidden threaded inserts as before since they only need 3/8 inch depth the will be flat with the surface. They are wider at the top then at the bottom, so we used a step drill bit to achieve a conical shaped hole since the acrylic doesn't compress like plywood does. We drilled the holes on the drill press at low speed (540 RPM) and lubricated the drill bit with dish soap to keep the heat from damaging the acrylic.








My original plan was to do a very neat job with the wiring making each wire the exact length it needed to go between the controls and the electronics and then zip tie everything into specific wire bundles. As we attached the acrylic top to the sleeve, it became apparent that with all the wire needed for the LEDs, it was just way too much to do so neatly in such a tiny space between the modules. Since some of the controls and the electronics boards were attached to the sleeve and the buttons and spinners were attached to the acrylic top (22 buttons and two spinners), we would need slack between the two so that we could remove the top if necessary without disconnecting the wiring and we also used connectors if we had to completely separate the two. We used a 24-pin motherboard power extender cable and cut it in half attaching one end to the sleeve and one end to the acrylic top for easy disconnect of the button wires. We crimped four pin headers onto each of the button LED leads. With these issues solved, we wired up all of the buttons and spinners after applying the artwork and combining the top and bottom acrylic panels. It finally looked like a control panel.



The plywood piece above the control panel is the original control panel prototype I had created earlier. I drilled out areas for all of the controls to fit through and added a few 4" strips of wood underneath so that it would function as a stand. Whenever we want to work on the wiring on the underside of the board, we can turn the control panel upside down, place it on the stand and it sits flat without the controls bearing any weight. The weatherstrips protect the acrylic from scratching.

Here's the side view from the back of the control panel with it sitting on the frame and a close up of how densely everything is packed in there.








All there was to do now was slide the control panel into the control box and connect the USB and 8-pin connector to the cabinet and we have a functioning control panel!

[Jimbo]

Very nice. That CP looks great when lit!

 

[thatpurplestuff]

Looking great so far, I'm loving that super thick plexi!

[javeryh]

That control panel looks amazing lit up like that.  Nice job.

[LTC]

Control panel looks fantastic.

[mjwolfe]

Finishing some of the more boring parts of the cabinet, still needs to be done. To finalize the back, I built a frame out of hardwood that would be permanently attached to the cabinet. Attached to the frame on the inside are small blocks to attach the hinges for the back doors. There are also small blocks at the edges to screw the frame to the cabinet from the inside. The power switch/power cord module is cut into this frame. I also put two small blocks of wood on the back to discourage fingers from getting near the power contacts.









Next, I cut the doors out of plywood and cut an opening for the air intake fans near the bottom of the right door. I used some 170 degree hinges that I had left over from an old project.















Our side art finally arrived. We couldn't wait to put the artwork on the cabinet. The vinyl attached quite easily. We set the cabinet on each side after removing the control panel box. pulled the backing off about 6 inches at a time and pressed it in place with a thick towel. I used a set of Exacto knives and cut the artwork off at the outer edge of the T-molding slot.





Some of the final touches are about all that's left of the hardware.

I added two surge-supressing power strips. The lower one is powered directly from the power cord. I got a 12V operated relay off of Amazon. It plugs into the first power strip to feed the upper power strip. It's triggered off of a molex connector to the PC power supply.





I added a small shelf for the audio amplifier...



and a plastic tray for the quarters to drop into below the coin door...



and zip tied all of the wiring in place...





One of the last tasks was adding the LED strip backlighting under the cabinet and on the back.





And with that it seems to be a fully functioning arcade cabinet.

[mjwolfe]

With the hardware completed, we've been focusing on the software. We're using BigBox as our front end. We've been loading emulators and configuring the controls for all of our favorite games. A couple of the challenging ones were CupHead (a clever hand animated PC arcade game) and Motherload (a MiniClip game my son remembers fondly).

We spent about 3 weeks planning and two months constructing. I'm sure it would have taken a lot longer if we weren't staying at home all the time. Playing it has the same feel as when I used to play the original arcade games 40 years ago. So, it's been a very rewarding project.

Here's where we show it off with a nice video: Presenting the Battlestar Galactica Arcade Cabinet

[Jimbo]

It looks great - well done! 

You'll need a bigger coin box though!  That'll fill up in no time and you'll get annoyed with having to empty it all the time.

The only thing I'd have done differently is put a Freesync/G-sync monitor in and run groovymame, so you can get all the games running at their original refresh rates to eliminate tearing, and get low input latency.  I'd hate to think you've put all that effort in on the cab for the games to play sluggish and jerky!

[Kingcade]

Love this build! The graphics, control panel, and build quality are all top notch! Too bad there was never actually a Battlestar Gallactica game to play on it (as far as I know).

[PL1]

Too bad there was never actually a Battlestar Gallactica game to play on it (as far as I know).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Battlestar_Galactica_video_games


Scott