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SPENCER ARCADE

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camsauce:
Hi there BYOAC'ers!  I've started this thread to show my cabinet entitled 'SAUCE*ARCADE'.  I have been playing videogames since the Atari 2600 came out, I can still remember having 'tournaments' of COMBAT with my friends and their brothers while chowing down on chips, melted cheese sandwiches and generic soda. During this time in my life I spent a great deal of my money (and my father's spare change supply) on arcade games as I'm sure you did as well.  I first found out about MAME around 5 years ago and had only a passive interest in it at the time because it didn't support many games and it felt buggy. I had not considered building a cab until about 2 1/2 years ago when I noticed that the state of MAME was very different. I noticed that people were building some arcade cabinets with fully legit arcade controls and working coin doors, cool frontends/tools and the game support was getting impressive. It was at this point that I *had* to build a cabinet.  I started building my cabinet in Winter of 2003-04 and "finished" around Spring 2006.  Two years later and I'm back at it...

camsauce:
Initial construction photos.  I had two power tools to my name at this point, a circular saw and a cordless drill.  I started with some sheets of 1/2" MDF and some 2x4's.  I knew that I was going to use a TV that could be pretty heavy so I made a sort of 'cart' out of 2x4's.  I attached 2 fixed casters and 2 rotating casters to the bottom so that the cab could be pushed around.  I later picked up a router and a slot cutting bit.  I also ordered some T-molding samples to get a feel of the size/shape I wanted.

camsauce:
Control Panel cutout.  I debated back and forth whether to go with 2 or 4 players and ultimately decided on 2.  There just aren't that many games that support 4 players and I can always use some USB joysticks or similar for those rare occasions.  I also knew that I wanted a somewhat form fitting cabinet and had seen far too many frankenpanels to know that I did not want that many buttons.  I want the arcade to be as accessible as possible to people of all ages. One thing I wanted was to angle the buttons and joysticks to give each player some elbow room.  One thing I don't miss about arcades is the armpit bouquet of fellow players.  :laugh: Edit:  I'm a retard, don't angle your controls!

camsauce:
Primed with Kilz2 and ready for more paint.  I considered laminate but didn't want to cough up the dough, plus I knew I wanted something more than black or one solid color.

camsauce:
Paint job and theming begin.  I wanted a cabinet that had a theme, more so then just being a Mame cabinet. I thought about theming a lot until one day it dawned on me that I should theme it off of a World War 2 era P51 Mustang plane, specifically a re-imagining of Bud Anderson's P51 "Old Crow". These old planes had the coolest paintjobs and I felt that it would fit in nicely with an arcade cabinet. This was confirmed when I purchased a book called 'Flying Aces - Aviation Art of World War 2' that has very cool paintings and illustrations of World War 2 planes from all countries. I also knew that I wanted a blue vs. red type feeling on the cab, so the plan is to layout player 1 as all blue and player 2 as all red. I will also try to incorporate the checkers and other elements throughout the cabinet design.  The cabinet color is actually not true black but a BEHR paint color called 'Stealth Jet' in High Gloss, it has almost a slight metallic dark grey color to it.  The light grey was mixed using high gloss white and flat black.

The other thing I have not seen done yet is textured side arts.  I had some thumbtacks laying around and thought they'd look cool mimicking the rivets on a plane fuselage.  I had to drill a series of tiny holes and tap them in individually with a rubber mallet as the spikes would bend under the pressure of the hammer.  Some paint touch up is in order.

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