| Main > Project Announcements |
| Virtua Fighter to Multicade Conversion |
| (1/5) > >> |
| Vater:
This project has been 10 years in the making, although in reality the actual work on it started late last year. PART I I bought a working Virtua Fighter cabinet a decade ago, I think it was early 2011, from a guy who buys and sells used arcade equipment (he's still in business). Despite never owning or working on an arcade cabinet before, and no real woodworking skills, I had grand plans for it, but other priorities coupled with some technical issues resulted in the cabinet sitting untouched for years. I lived in a townhome in Virginia at the time, and here it sat in my basement. This was the only photo I could find of when I first got it. I quickly got bored of playing the original game, which was fine with me because it isn't that good, it was never a title I spent quarters on back in the day, and it wasn't the reason I bought it in the first place. A funny aside: I have never been very active on these forums, but in this 2012 thread discussing the age old topic of angled joysticks, my Virtua Fighter cabinet left a few folks (myself included) scratching their heads. Until then, no one had seen a stock cabinet with angled joysticks. My plan all along for this cab was to build a custom control panel for it and run MAME on a PC housed inside. My good friend had given me his old X-Arcade tankstick with trackball and his whole collection of emulators and roms, so I had a really good start and some of the main controls I would need. Ideally my new control panel would have two-player bat sticks with a basic Street Fighter layout, a trackball, spinner and flight stick (Tron and the like), and I really wanted to also have a ball-top and a couple buttons for single player games like Galaga (my alltime fav) and Pac-Man. Yes, it would be a big Frankenpanel, but over the years of reading these forums, I knew I wanted to keep it reasonably proportionate to the cabinet and as uncluttered as possible despite the number of controls. When browsing the guy's warehouse, there were a few other cabinets I liked, but this one kept calling to me. I liked the overall shape and design, and preferred how close the monitor was to the player (vs. cabinets like Golden Tee or Gauntlet, where the monitor sits much lower at nearly a 45° angle). It had a working original 27" medium res monitor, so early on I bought an ArcadeVGA card and Arcade Monitor Video Amplifier from Ultimarc to connect my PC to it. If I recall, I think I got this working at some point, but the monitor crapped out soon after. I don't even remember what broke; it probably just needed a cap kit, but I knew I wanted to go an easier route and I soon found a 29" VGA monitor for a really good price and took a hacksaw to the metal brackets in the cabinet to make it fit. It worked very well except for the black plastic surround which no longer fit. A minor issue I would correct a decade later. But first, that monitor would also take a dump a few short months after I bought it (horizontal hold issue, if I recall), and I would lose motivation to make any progress for years to come... |
| Vater:
PART II In 2013 my family moved to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. A larger home meant more space and a nice large garage to work in. Above the garage is a finished space that would become my home office and mancave/gameroom. I was en route to my new house in a U-haul when our movers had already arrived, and the VFCab was the first thing they carried inside and up the stairs. My wife told me later they were all cursing my name as they struggled with it on the narrow staircase. It's a beast of a cabinet. Here it sat, with still far too many more important projects taking priority. It would be another 7+ years before any progress was made. Having been in the home for almost 7 years when COVID hit, I began working from home which gave me a lot more free time (my daily commute was at least two hours total). That spring I found myself cleaning my oversized 3-car garage, and then took on the task over the summer of painting it and adding better and more lighting. I'll spare everyone the details of the 5 month project and just show the before and after photos. Before: After: With added lighting over workbench: With a nicer shop to work in came the motivation to finally start transforming the cabinet from a 6 foot, 400 pound paperweight into a working video arcade. First things first, though: the monitor needed fixing, and I don't know the first thing about CRT repair and really had no desire to learn. I searched locally for a TV repair shop, and through a conversation with a vendor on Facebook Messenger, I was advised to contact Chad at arcadecup.com. Located in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it wasn't the most convenient idea, but I wanted the monitor fixed and since the services Chad provides include complete reconditioning of all boards, it seemed worth the cost. The projected 40-some day wait was a little offputting at first, and ended up being quite a bit longer, but I was ok with it since I had plenty of work to do on the cabinet itself. After nearly a decade, this project was finally off the ground... |
| javeryh:
Your pics are not showing... |
| Vater:
Ugh...thanks for the heads up. Sorry about that, will fix shortly. Part III coming today as well... |
| Vater:
Ok, images should be visible now...please let me know if they aren't! PART III Having shipped the monitor boards to Chad at the beginning of October, the first step to getting the cabinet started was to come up with a design for the control panel. I had fiddled around with this very early on when I still lived in the townhouse, using an old application called Mameroom CDP (Control Panel Designer). I played around with a few variations, mostly trying to figure out which location would work best for the ball-top and buttons for the single player games, with consideration given to keeping the trackball free of obstacles. I even modeled the full cabinet in Sketchup with the intention of playing around with different control panel designs, but it never really panned out beyond a couple rough ideas. Ultimately I decided the best approach was to keep the design of the original control panel and scale it up a bit to fit the controls I wanted to use. I liked the look of the oddly angled side pieces and opted to at least try to recreate them (albeit larger) with my limited woodworking skills. They fit the overall design of the cabinet well and I didn't want to lose those aesthetics with a generic looking box or a panel with a curved front edge. By early February I had finally received my repaired and reconditioned monitor, and for my birthday that same week I'd received a Bosch wood router (my only request), both of which gave me all the motivation I needed to get this cab done. By that time I had pretty much determined the layout I wanted for the controls and started mocking up an actual panel using a spare piece of 1/4" hardboard from the back of a cabinet I trashed when remodeling the garage. First hole drilled was for the trackball. Fortunately, the X-Gaming site contains detailed instructions for installation, including the hole saw size needed (2 7/8"). The red buttons and two of the solid white buttons were pulled from the original Virtua Fighter panel, the white ball-top Sanwa was taken from an old control panel a coworker had given me, and all the other controls were from the X-Arcade tankstick. That's what the first set of controls looked like after drilling with a 1 1/8" spade bit. I still hadn't placed the flight stick, spinner, start and admin buttons yet; I wanted to get a feel for what I had first, and see where the rear controls should go so that the front ones wouldn't be in the way. I initially measured the surface to be 35"x17", and it seemed a little large, but not too bad. After drilling these first holes, I was concerned about how rough the edges were and wondered if the spade bit would fare better on the piece of HDF I planned to use for the final build. I looked into how to clean up the rough edges and found that a Forstner bit was the way to go, so I bought one and drilled the holes for the remaining controls. Here is the result; a pretty drastic difference: I wanted to see how the panel would look on the cabinet, so I trimmed off the excess hardboard and cut two notches in the rear so it would fit around the cabinet's sides and sit flush against the glass. I still needed a flight stick and spinner, so I ordered a Turbo Twist II from groovygamegear.com and since Tron is probably my favorite game that uses a flight stick, I went with a Glen's Retro Show Tron-themed LED-lighted stick from my local MicroCenter. And then to see how the full mockup would look with the cabinet... Now, for 10 years the plan was always to reuse what I already had when building this thing, but after mocking up the panel to this point, the red, black and white buttons didn't really match the color scheme of the cabinet. Brand new Happ Competition joysticks and buttons wouldn't break the bank, so I ordered some controls that would really work nicely with the Virtua Fighter theme. All along I'd planned to swap out the Sanwa ball-top with an Ultrastik 360, which arrived around the same time as the Happ controls (for the photos, I simply swapped out the ball-top itself, not the full stick). I think the colors work a lot better to tie the panel in with the cabinet. The panel itself I thought was a little too big, which is exactly the sort of thing building a mockup should bring to light so it can be addressed in the final product. Finally, construction of the actual control panel could begin... |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |