SPENCER ARCADE

[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.  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.

[miles2912]

I am just loving that theme having been a huge fan of the classic warbirds.  Keep up the great work and I am looking forward to its completion.

D-

[camsauce]

Installing the coin door.  I initially thought I would make a door with the coin door inset and be able to swing the whole thing open.  The coin door bucket turned out to be too deep to make this happen so what you see here is my attempt to split the door into 2.  I had to patch the coin door side so that it is part of the front of the cabinet again and make a smaller door on the right side. I almost didn't even go with a coin door, but every cab I've seen without one just looks funny.  Plus what good is an arcade without the cha-ching noise of putting in a quarter/token?

Oh.. and I've now taken up residence in the soon to be finished basement bathroom as there is nowhere else to work at this intersection of time.

[camsauce]

Marquee light, speakers and marquee installed.

For the marquee light, I purchase a cheapo fluorescent worklight from HD, the bulb is not serviceable though .  I installed it by simply sending two short screws into the cabinet and the light fixture itself has little mounting holes that you slide the fixture to lock it in.  For speakers I'm using a Creative Labs SBS 4.1 I picked up for like $30 at Walmart. The sound is not the best but it should work fine for a jukebox and games.  The best part about it is the wired volume knob that I'm still debating where to place on the cab.  I made a 'shelf' for the speakers to rest on and simply drilled a bunch of holes for the sound to come out of.  I tried to make a cool hole pattern with a drill but it quickly turned to crap so I covered the hole speaker panel with some speaker fabric that is stapled into the cab.  I also designed a marquee and had it printed by classicarcadegrafix.com and they did a pretty good job.  I have a little bit of light leakage on the sides of the marquee that I'll combat somehow.  I did not use a marquee holder but rather two pieces of Optix (acrylic) sandwiched together and screwed into the 2x2's that support the cabinet frame.

PS.  Junior Mints > All candy put together

[camsauce]

The whole time I was making the cabinet it didn't really occur to me to plan for a trackball.  I managed to trade some Photoshop work with another board member "Timoe" for a trackball (thanks dude!).  My assumption is that my panel could accommodate it no problem - turns out I was wrong.  No big deal, I'll just cut a new one, besides I wanted to move up to 5/8" wood so that I could route the joystick and trackball bases and allow for 3/4" T-molding so that I could cover both the wood and the acrylic top.  As you can see, my routing skills need a little bit more work.  No worries though, that's what an artwork overly is for!  So I started work on a new panel and tweaked my artwork slightly.  I printed out my un-tweaked artwork on a tektronics printer that took 11x17 paper and stitched them together so I could use it as a template of sorts.

[camsauce]

Here's a closeup of the control panel artwork with some enlarged detail windows.  I'm really buying into the concept of branding the cabinet, the S*A acronym has become pretty prevalent around the cab.  I also made a custom boot up screen to hide the fact that windows is running on the cab.  I'm also using MaLa as my frontend and have a custom layout for that program.  In the frontend screenshot, the game information 'top secret' documents fill out with the currently selected game with details such as number of players, the year of the game etc. A video preview or screenshot of the selected game will appear on the upper left and the game titles all appear on the right in a circular scroll list to follow the diameter profile of the compass.  The currently selected game appears in the center of the compass crosshairs.

[dudebozo]

wow...very nice, i really like the p-51 theme.  makes me kind of want to come up with a theme as well.  i name my household rigs after Ford cars.  i'm kind of thinking of using MAMEstang.  i don't know, too easy to make fun of, LAMEstang.  keep up the great work. 

[camsauce]

MAMEstang eh?  Might be cool.. I could see a full side art of the red, white and blue horse logo and maybe a stylized cell shaded version of a mustang busting through some hay bails or jumping off of a ramp for the marquee or cp.

[Crafty]

Fantastic Effort so far, although with all the artwork I personally think it deserves a better name...

Are you just going with Mame for this machine or do you plan to run other EMU's..

[gamecreature]

Looking good. The theme is really coming together. Are you going to have the snapshots appear on the left side of the FE, under the "mission" graphics? That should look pretty cool.

[johnperkins21]

Really awesome work. The theme is really working with the MALA skin and the boot-up screen. Right now this rivals gamecreature's and missioncontrol's cabs as my favorite artwork/theme.

I am extremely jealous of all the different skillsets I see here. A few guys are just awesome with the art, while there's a few that just rock the whole woodworking thing, and then still others that just come up with crazy ideas that work really well. It's very humbling and exciting at the same time.

Keep up the good work. And make sure you share that MALA skin when you're done.

[camsauce]

Looking good. The theme is really coming together. Are you going to have the snapshots appear on the left side of the FE, under the "mission" graphics? That should look pretty cool.

Yep!  I am going to make the screenshots look like they are a scratched photo with an image mask, similar to the technique you used on your MaLa layout. It's too bad that MaLa can't support image masks for the video previews, cause that would rock it hard.  I also wish that it supported animated GIFs or SWFs because the possibilites would really expand at that point.

[camsauce]

Really awesome work. The theme is really working with the MALA skin and the boot-up screen. Right now this rivals gamecreature's and missioncontrol's cabs as my favorite artwork/theme.

I am extremely jealous of all the different skillsets I see here. A few guys are just awesome with the art, while there's a few that just rock the whole woodworking thing, and then still others that just come up with crazy ideas that work really well. It's very humbling and exciting at the same time.

Keep up the good work. And make sure you share that MALA skin when you're done.

Yeah I've often thought of that too, especially the woodworking skills of people like Knievel and Timoe and fellow photoshop monkeys Gamecreature and Pixelhugger.  If I thought that some good money good be made at making cabs I think there's at least a dozen or more board members that could put together some uniquely kickass cabs.  It might even work to run a company virtually, like a couple of guys scattered throughout the world doing artwork, marketing and business stuff and a little shop in Anywhere, USA doing the assembly.  I think if I started this cab over right now it would be 200% better from a woodworking perspective as I've definitely learned some lessons from my experience with this.

[javeryh]

Awesome mala skin!!  I love it!  I'm assuming the correct "Game Information" will appear for each game as you scroll through...  just amazing.  The amount of talent on these boards makes my head spin...

[johnperkins21]

I'm not sure how much info exists within the rom file, but I'm thinking it would be hot if you could update that little Mission Briefing area with the goals of the game. Just a basic description of what needs to be done. If it exists somewhere within the rom file, it probably wouldn't be too tough. Otherwise you'd probably have to do it from scratch.

[camsauce]

I'm not sure how much info exists within the rom file, but I'm thinking it would be hot if you could update that little Mission Briefing area with the goals of the game. Just a basic description of what needs to be done. If it exists somewhere within the rom file, it probably wouldn't be too tough. Otherwise you'd probably have to do it from scratch.

That would be slick!  I've always thought the .INI files for MAME were a bit lacking, like it seems that the catver has 20 or so driving categories and the games in each of the categories don't quite match up.  A 15-20 word description for each game including an objective would be cool, ditto for an INI that has a subjective rating so you could sort each category by the Top 10 games or similar.  I'm kinda struggling if I want to setup a tree in MaLa for the different categories or just leave one big large list.

[camsauce]

Innards, snouts and entrails.  Here's a pic of the TV (yadda yadda, arcade monitors are better blah blah  ) and the PC I'm putting into the cabinet.  The TV is a 24" Samsung with a flat screen I picked up at Circuit City for ~$200.  I tweaked it for quite sometime until I got a picture suprisingly close to a 17" monitor (also pictured) and this was just with S-Video.  I will be upgrading to component as soon as possible to get that last little bit of quality, things like small text are still somewhat hard to read.  The PC is an AMD Sempron 64 2800 with 256MB of RAM and an old ATI All-in-Wonder PCI video card for the TV output. It houses several small IDE drives to store all of the roms which I'll be upgrading soon.  The PC is also running TinyXP.  What is TinyXP you ask?  It's a stripped down version of XP Professional that you can find on the net from the usual sources.  It removes all of the services that you don't need, accessibility options, superflous control panel options, wallpapers, icons, registry settings, etc. etc.  The post time with this OS is awesome compared to a vanilla XP installation, I get to the desktop in just a hair past 30 seconds. I'm sure I can get it even faster if I forced an IP address to the NIC or didn't use networking at all.

[johnperkins21]

Wow. That's the exact same TV I was planning to use for my cab. I even turned the basic dimensions of it into a component using Google Sketch-Up. Let us know how much improvement you see when using the component cables as opposed to S-Video or composite.

[camsauce]

Wow. That's the exact same TV I was planning to use for my cab. I even turned the basic dimensions of it into a component using Google Sketch-Up. Let us know how much improvement you see when using the component cables as opposed to S-Video or composite.

It is a slick little set, nice and shallow and a bit on the heavy side.  Beware.. I have yet to find out how to have the set automatically turn itself on after a power failure (or with a smartstrip for that matter).  It does remember your input and video/sound settings.  Since the power button is smack dab in the middle of the set, I'm rigging up a pushbutton that will attach to the bezel and when pushed will physically push in the TV power button.  I suppose I could still get one-button-powerup by activating the TV first which would trigger the computer? Hmmm...

[johnperkins21]

It is a slick little set, nice and shallow and a bit on the heavy side.  Beware.. I have yet to find out how to have the set automatically turn itself on after a power failure (or with a smartstrip for that matter).  It does remember your input and video/sound settings.  Since the power button is smack dab in the middle of the set, I'm rigging up a pushbutton that will attach to the bezel and when pushed will physically push in the TV power button.  I suppose I could still get one-button-powerup by activating the TV first which would trigger the computer? Hmmm...

The other thing you could do, is to put a contact somewhere that the button activates. So, when you push it, it pushes the TV power button and closes a contact that acts as a power on for the smartstrip. Not sure if I'm explaining it correctly, or how easy it would be to do. Just throwing ideas into the pot.

I saw the TV at Best Buy and thought, wow that is absolutely the perfect set. Nice to know that someone else out there feels the same way.

[BlinKY1337]

I wish i had a basement stupid  florida

[camsauce]

Worked on a couple things today.  I was really nervous about cutting the acrylic for the CP.  I used some stuff called Optix that I got at HD, it's a bit cheaper then lexan and has similar properties to plexiglass.  It is somewhat prone to crack however, and I did crack another sheet when working on my marquee.  The idea behind cutting this stuff is that you score it several times with a special blade than 'snap' it with a bit of pressure to get a clean break.  I was especially paranoid about cutting the hole for the trackball as I didn't want to buy a $20 3" hole bit.  So I took my chances with a router and a mortising bit.  While this stuff can be routed cleanly, you've got to be really quick as it will melt in no time flat and leave you with a really bad edge. I managed to route the hole by starting a pilot hole and routed by having the bit shaft rub against the profile of the trackball mount that was in place while routing, this resulted in a perfect circle to the exact diameter and placement that I needed. 

I made a design mistake with bezel design in that I left a gap at the bottom where the CP meets the cabinet, to rectify this I simply cut a ~3" strip to attach to the bottom that will meet flush with the top of the CP and provide a shelf for the plexiglass to rest on.  Lastly, I made a shelf for the TV and placed some blocks at the back to keep the TV in place.  I would go with something more secure but it's doing a good job holding and serviceability is important to me.  Besides, I don't plan on moving the cab for a loooooong time.  Only some paint touchup, CP wiring and bezel work to go!

[TehJefe]

The cab artwork and design is breathtakingly radass and also, Im really envious of the super attractive basement.  It's just got really good style.  We here in california are lacking in the basement department so I had to stick with a cocktail table, a design that can work as furnature, as well as entertainment. Unfortunately Cocktail cabinets just dont look right to me unless they are designed with that classic retro style... otherwise Id really love to try a themed cab like this one.

[camsauce]

Control Panel Wiring.  I was inspired to do some cable management after seeing what others on the board have done with their cabs.  I used some dikes and romex wire holder dealies to keep everything under control. 

[camsauce]

CP Mount.  To mount the CP box to the cabinet I used some L-brackets and some machine screws with washers and nuts.  This way I can take it off if necessary to move the cab.  I initially was thinking of a piano hinge on the CP top so that the top hinged forward but ultimately thought velcro would be faster and work just as good, turns out I was right. I also made a bezel by using a sheet of Optix (acrylic) of which I masked off the TV screen and painted the BACK of the sheet with FUSION spray paint.  The instruction card was printed in a couple of sheets on photopaper and adhered to the back of the bezel using tape.  I will be replacing this soon as the seams between the sheets are bothersome.

[camsauce]

TV Monitor auto-power on hack.  The TV I purchased does not auto power on after power fail so the remote had to be used.  I soon discovered that if the power button was held down when the TV received power that the TV would come on by itself.  The power button also happens to be circular and exactly the size of a penny.  I wonder what would happen if I threw my .02 into the mix (pardon the pun)?  Would the earth collide with the moon?  Would Mr T return to Saturday Mornings?? Would it be possible to have a single button to turn everything on for the arcade ?!?!?

Yes, it is possible and yes it is somewhat ghetto.  So, what you see here is a Samsung TV Penny Power On Hack or STPPOH for short

[camsauce]

Some miscellaneous final pics of the cab.  The door on the right has a black pushbutton that activates everything on the cab with one touch via a smartstrip, one touch also powers everything off.  There is also a lock on the door that still needs some attention.  It was a fun project to put together, I have plans for the future such as swapping out the pushbuttons for lighted translucents (red on the right, blue on the left) along with some slikstick handles, a proper marquee retainer, new instruction card, frontend tweaks, cupholders, etc. etc.  etc.

[Crafty]

Very Nice 

[gamecreature]

So how many emus are you running on that thing?

[Havok]

Awesome cab - I love the layout!

[art-ki-tech]

Its good to see people with some of the same hobby's as myself (Home theater, arcade,....) Well I would like to commend you on your arcade. I think that it is original and innovative. I really like that front end!!! Keep up the good work.

[MovingTarget]

Its good to see people with some of the same hobby's as myself (Home theater, arcade,....) Well I would like to commend you on your arcade. I think that it is original and innovative. I really like that front end!!! Keep up the good work.

Ditto that.  I too have a dedicate HT room with 100" screen and Sony HS20 pj and my neighbor has a dedicate HT and converted some old no name arcade machine into a MAME box.

Technology is fun!

I wish I had room to put my MAME cab in the back of my theater, I've only got about 4' behind the last row and I'm affraid what it would do the acoustics of the room 

[Timoe]

I built a MAME cab that is very "stock" so I can really appreciate a cab with a design as unique as this.

I really dig the access door next to the coin door.  Was that art painted on? 

[danny_galaga]

excellent paint job! vinyl! shminyl!

[camsauce]

So how many emus are you running on that thing?

9 emulators, pretty much everything to cover the system logos I put in the marquee with the exception of Dreamcast and Playstation of which I'm putting the actual consoles into the cabinet.

[camsauce]

Its good to see people with some of the same hobby's as myself (Home theater, arcade,....) Well I would like to commend you on your arcade. I think that it is original and innovative. I really like that front end!!! Keep up the good work.

I'm betting several people on the board share this same combo of hobbies.  Thanks for the praise, here's hoping the next one will be even better!  I already have a theme in mind...