I am in my forties and I recall fondly my good high school days in a French small town in Burgundy, sneaking out from high school to gather in one of the numerous smoky cafes scattered in the city to spend my few francs on video games ranging from the mid-80s to early 90’s such as Double Dragon, Golden Axe, Ghost and Goblins, Rygar and later on Willow.
Being nostalgic about this time, I took on this project this year to build an arcade cabinet to reproduce this feeling and share as well the joy with my children (they are fond of Super Street Fighter II).
Below is the description of the cabinet and all the web references I used to build it. Thanks to all of them for sharing the information; their names are indicated below in each link. Also, it took me quite some time and a few trials and errors to build this project from scratch. If the info below can give some hints to someone willing to build a similar cabinet, this post will have achieved its purpose. If someone needs more details about some aspects of its construction, I can post more detailed pictures and explanations.
I wanted this cabinet to be as close as possible to the real one (although I reckon this cabinet can be improved, especially for the artwork).
The components are as follow :
- ¾ in MDF board following Dynamo HS1 generic arcade cabinet. I followed the blueprint from classicarcadecabinets.com. The cabinet manual can be found on drzero.org.
- 16-gauge Custom built steel control panel and marquee holders.
- 8 button layout (to allow for street fighter II as well as Neo geo 4-button games). I downloaded the button layout from www.slagcoin.com
- Coin door with light and coin insert
- Double dragon artwork (quality picture downloaded from mameworld.info and simply printed in Costco along with the marque)
- ¼ in plexiglass (can be found in plastic supplier, cut to size)
- Custom built marquee (printed in Costco with a lot of LED lights on the back. Result is ok but it is certainly better to buy a proper marquee online)
- Custom built bezel, following this thread on the forum of arcadecontrols.com
- 50$ 9 years old Dual Core Small form factor Lenovo desktop running Windows 10
- 20$ Radeon HD7000 series video card with DVI-I output (basically VGA capable) purchased on ebay and running on the marvelous emucrt driver. I followed this very useful thread.
- 1998 19” Samsung CRT TV modded for direct RGB input (19” was the original CRT size for this cabinet. I followed the 8bit guy youtube video and selected the proper resistors from https://shmups.system11.org/ )
- Groovymame with attrac-mode front end
I picked the dynamo hs1 cabinet as it looks pretty much like the ones that were used back then in my town. Concerning the display, I first tried a 4/3 LCD screen; it gave pretty good results already (using HLSL to emulate scanlines curved screen). Yet ultimately I wanted to go with a modded CRT TV solution which gives great results. This solution is challenging though for someone who does not know much about electronics. As a side note, higher resolution / screen frequency games such as Narc run very well on a CRT TV as well (using interlaced mode)
Finally I spent many hours looking at Linux based solution (I am a linux guy), retroarch, raspberry, but I found windows + emucrt + Radeon + CRT TV to be the best path to near pixel perfect result.
Remaining work
Coin reject button :
I plan to print the coin reject button insert using my laser printer on plastic sheets. For a better result, those parts can be purchased on suzzohapp website.
Power on switch and switch relay :
I will add:
A switch connected to the ON/OFF switch of the computer to boot the system without having to reach the back of the cabinet
a USB power switch relay to enable the switch on the TV once Mame is launched so to imitate a real arcade cabinet boot.
Issues (if someone can help, much appreciated
Launching Mame and then a game is no problem. Launching the same game from Attract is a lot slower (an some time freeze Mame)
I have some slight vertical overscan problems : I would like to shift the screen down by a few lines but I can’t do it from the service menu of my TV. I tried to play the radeon card settings without success so far. Not a big deal though.



