I've learned a ton from this forum, and wanted to offer some slight contribution if I could. I searched this forum from one end to the other, and found answers to almost every question I had. What I didn't find, I got answers to with my own posts.
My cabinet isn't one for the record books, it's pretty prefab through and through, but I think it turned out pretty nice anyway. I bought a UAII cabinet, and a 2nd hand (great condition) SlikStik Classic off ebay. I got it for about $200 less than a new one, which was great. Prior to that I was thinking about picking up an X-arcade Tankstik. I was convinced after reading numerous posts that the Tankstick would leave me unhappy in the end, but I couldn't afford a brand new SlikStik Classic.
I'm a Mac guy, so this was kind of scary for me, but I broke down and bought a PC (first one since I began using computers 11 years ago). Although there is movement, MAME on the Mac just isn't quite there yet. I found a great deal on Tiger Direct the day after Thanksgiving for $200 (after rebates). It's a P4 3.2 GHZ system. I added a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB video card, a wireless G Linksys card, a 160GB SATA harddrive and a new powersupply (after mine fried from all of the heavy computing). Attached to the 9600 pro is a DVI to RGB dongle that is set to 480i. Pretty darn simple really. I just plugged it in and it worked. I'm running mame at 640x432.
For the monitor, I bought the Insignia 27" with Component video. It looks great and with the help of the service menu, I got it tweaked to look just right. If you have this TV and want to enter the service menu, hold down the volume down button on the TV, and then press the number 9 on the remote for about 5 seconds (Thanks to jWin for passing that along. Here's another post I started about the TV:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=60757.0I got those items ordered and began to think about art. I started the thread below to get the creative juices flowing:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=60861.0So I ended up creating my own art which looked like this in Adobe Illustrator:
I contacted Scott at Mame marquees several times, but (as you can imagine) he was pretty swamped with Christmas orders and the recent acquisition of Classicarcadegrafix. I was impatient, so I found a local sign shop owned by a friend (
www.quintcustomsigns.com) to do cut vinyl for me. Best part is that he installed, and had it ready in 2 days from the time I ordered it. You can see the way it turned out in the first photo. I bought some Lexan at Lowes, and he did that with vinyl too.
The UAII kit was pretty easy to put together. The construction is pretty sturdy, and the finish is very nice. I know it's a cliche, but had to add a shot of the bottom half put together since I've see a bunch of those in project posts. You can see the UAII portion of the cabinet completed in the third photo.
I decided to do a bezel and smoked glass after reading lots of great stuff about them on the forum. The most nerve racking thing for me was trimming that bezel down to size. I was very afraid I was going to mess it up, but I measured 2 or 3 times and cut once with an xacto knife. The one thing I didn't find instructions for, (but I didn't look for very long) was how to know exactly where to drill the hole for the remote IR.
Here's what I did:
1. Take the bezel off
2. Take a freshly cut scrap piece of bezel that is the same height and place it next to the IR thingy. Mark it with a pen.
3. Drill a hole in the scrap piece and place it in front of the IR thingy. Make sure the remote works.
4. Put a piece of tape on the shelf (where the TV sits) directly under the center of IR thingy.
5 Re-install the bezel and the tape will show you how far over to drill.
6. Place the scrap piece of the bezel over top of the installed bezel and the hole will give you your height.
There are probably other more sophisticated ways to accomplish this, but that's how I did it. I just put Velcro in the 4 corners and on the TV (pictured below) and the bezel holds up great.
From there I installed the glass. I had them slightly under cut it so I didn't have any trouble. It fits perfectly. I placed 4 corners of Velcro on that and the bezel. I also took the soft part of the Velcro and attached it to the back of the glass, and then brought it around to the front, and folded it in on itself. This created a small tab for me to pull the glass off when I need to. That Velcro holds great.
You can see a couple of nearly completed shots below.
More in the next post!
RubberP