My first Scratch Build - A Bartop

[moloch]

Well after reading post after post after post I am finally building a cabinet from scratch. I have a converted Street Fighter Cabinet at my house running Mame and I really love it, but I have always wanted a bartop.

So the plan has been.

Build a prototype.
Figure out everything that went wrong, and correct it.
Create Templates for everything.
Build the cabinet of my bartop dreams, and have the ability to make more for my friends if they want one.

My uncle has helped me immensely with all of this. He has a wood shop and a huge amount of knowledge.

I am in the process of building the Prototype right now. It is based on the classic Namco shape. Originally I was going to do a Flat panel screen and have some kind of interchangeable control panels. But with CRT's so easy to find I went that route for now. This created my first problem. We had already made the sides, top, and bottom so when we switched to a CRT it was a little shallow. We will have to build a doghouse over the back.

After I finish this cabinet I may just try to sell it to fund making the next two.

I have decided to use AdvanceCD to power the game aspects of the cabinet. The motherboard and BIOS do not support booting from USB, but I think that we can make it boot from CD and then go to the USB to run. That way you will be able to save your game settings and menu preferences.

My hope is to have it very kid friendly so that it will not need a hard drive, just to play games. I have toyed with the idea of having a hard drive in the cabinet but put a toggle switch on its power so that it will not come up unless you turn it on. That way if the USB drive ever became corrupted or you wanted to run a Jukebox it would have the ability.

Here is a website with a few pictures of the progress that we have made:
http://www.godotgutierre.com/Arcade

Comming soon:
The Fixed control panel.
Art Ideas.
The exterior control box with additional joysticks and gizmos.


I cannot thank the Build Your Own Arcade Controls site and forum enough. The information here has been incredibly helpful.

Thank you all so much.

[leapinlew]

How are you handling the marquee?

[Donkey_Kong]

Cool man. Good luck with your prototype and the eventual sale of it. I actually thought I would sell my first cab as well but I'm becoming pretty attached to now and it would be very hard to ever sell now.


The picture on this monitor seems stellar! 

[moloch]

We have not gotten to the Marquee yet.

We should have enough room at the top to have a small light. I may experiment with using a couple of small banks of LED lights to illuminate the Marquee.

I also have some ideas about the artwork and that my effect how I handle the whole marquee issue.

[vrf]

Nice work so far!

I'm interested to see how your LED experiment goes. It seems like it'd be a really good way to light a smaller marquee.

Keep up the good work!

[moloch]

I am working on making my own Joystick handles that I can add a fire button to. I really love Assault and battle zone.

I will post pictures when I have a bit more work done, but I have access to a lathe and I have some friends that also have lathes and they seem to think that this should be easily doable.

 

[moloch]

I have made the template that I am going to use to cut out my first control panel for the Bartop. I want it to have two joysticks and six buttons. That way I can play games like Robotron, karate champ, and whatever.

I am working on the firetop joystick solution and hoping to have some progress within the next two weeks.

We have this joke at work about Machete Fights so I came up with some quick artwork for the panel as if the  controls were for a real game called "Friday Night Machete Fight" I may use this theme for the marquee and side art as well. Nothing is set in stone.

I will be mounting all of my control buttons somewhere other then on the panel surface. I am not exactly sure where yet, but working on it.

[armax]

looks interesting.  Look forward to seeing more.

[moloch]

I have added some Blog software to my site so that it is now a blog of my progress on this build and hopefully future builds.
The address again is:

http://www.godotgutierre.com/Arcade/

I will be posting what I write on the blog about this build here and also answer any questions.

This weekend was a pretty good one for progress.

   1. Got the first control panel built.
   2. Created and applied some control panel graphics as a test.
   3. Figured out  the wood bezel.
   4. Able to get the marquee fleshed out.

I think that in the next couple of weekends we should be able to get this buttoned up.

[moloch]

Things that need to be sorted out this week and or bought this week:

   1. Amplifier for Speakers
   2. Volume Control
   3. Marquee Light
   4. Possible switch for audio to external speakers.
   5. How to hook up external connections  and maintain access.
   6. Fan(s) for the case.
   7. Make additional control panel.

I received the Bits Unlimited Smart strip yesterday and will install it this weekend.

[moloch]

It really seems that the little things take the longest to work out and to finalize. This weekend most of the time was spent modifying the amplifier. I used a small pair of computer speakers and desodered the volume knob and headphone jack. This way we will be able to mount volume knob and headphone jack right below the monitor.  We cut a strip of Plexiglass that fits right in the area between the control panel and monitor.

[psychotech]

Hello!

It really seems that the little things take the longest to work out and to finalize.

The cab is really looking good! And you're spot on on the little things department .. should I use or ..

Well, anyway: Designing - building - XXX - ..and finally playing your own creation .. = Worth

GREAT WORK! 

[moloch]

If you want to see the images you can check them out on the blog site:
http://www.godotgutierre.com/Arcade/

Ok, I have actually worked on this machine a lot over the last few weeks. I have forgotten my camera so not much has been documented. As well as the fact that a lot of what has happened has been very non-photogenic technical issues.

I have cleaned up the wiring on the control panel. I still have to cut some of the extra wires but am loathe to do that until I have finalized everything.
Cleaned up wires

I have also cut a piece of vinyl to cover the control panel.
control panel
The extra switched on the right are stand ins until the control panel is complete and wired up. They are the add coin, enter button, pause, tab, and what not.

The control strip is designed and basically built. It is a layer of plexiglass and it then has a vinyl backing.

command strip

We built the doghouse for the monitor back this weekend as well. This will cover up the back of the monitor since it turned out to be a bit bigger then originally thought. After doing this I have way more respect for HVAC guys.
This was done in a few steps:

   1. design the doghouse and print it out to be used as the cutting template
      doghouse plans
   2. Put together the paper version to check it out and make sure it works
      paper doghouse
   3. Now I wish I had brought my camera because I already had it cut out with aircraft shears and the first couple of bends done
      first bends
   4. The sheet metal break
      Sheet Metal Break
   5. The DogHouse
      Douhouse OneDouhouse Two

Now on to the Technical Achievements.

   1. Able to finally edit the AdvanceMame settings. This took a long time to finally get the answer I needed. I have to thank the AdvanceCD community and message boards. Everyone has been totally awesome.
   2. AdvanceCD 2.6.2 which is what I am using has a feature that forces it to eject the CD when you go to shutdown. I want to use this as more of an embedded system. It will be a stand alone machine. It took way to long to figure out how to make it not eject. I am very lucky to have a cousin that knows Linux all too well and he totally solved this in like 10 minutes. I wish I totally understood exactly what he did, and some day I will. The result is that it now works great and does not eject.

Hopefully next weekend it will be time to paint. I also have laminate that should be applied within the next week or so as well.

[moloch]

Ok I have done quite a bit over the last 2 weeks.

   1. Primed and painted the cabinet interior.
      a) Used an HVLP gun to do the priming.
      b) Hand rolled the Latex Flat Black.
   2. Built the Back.
      a)  Cut the holes for the fans.
      b)  Solid aluminum plate on the bottom of the back.
      c)  Put the dog-house in the back.

Ok so maybe when I write it out it looks like I only did two things, but they took quite a while to do and it gets us very very close to being done.

I really think that if I buckle down it will be done on Sunday and ready to play on Monday.

This Friday I will build the template of the side so that when I build the next cabinet it will go a lot faster and should be a lot easier. I am hoping that the next cabinet can be knocked out in just a couple maybe 3 or 4 weekends. I really think that it can be done in 2 but we shall see.

 

[moloch]

I once had a friend tell me a story about software design.

He said that once you are about 90% of the way there and you only have 10% left 90% of the real effort will be in that last 10%.

Well I believe that we are there.


We may actually be a bit more then 90%, but man it still feels like a lot needs to be done.
Lets recap last week:
Did the laminate
Did the t-molding (which was pretty easy overall)
Put in the Marquee light
Touch-up painting
Trimmed the control panel to fit better
Mounted the power strip
check out the gallery

Starting today here is what I will be doing this weekend I hope:
Put the computer back in.
Finish the electrical stuff
Mount the control strip that turns it all on and has the command buttons
Do some artwork for the marquee

More to come…..

[psychotech]

 

That looks great! (Tomato)Red sides.. Yesh! 

Still, waiting for LOTS of pics!!!

Psycho

[moloch]

So I am just going to call the whole thing done. I mean it is so close.

That may sound dramatic but it is done. It is playable at this point and the only thing left is just minor touch up. I finished the bezel and I did an instruction card:

The card in the bezel looks pretty good:

I had the machine at my office for about a week and it performed pretty well only minor interruptions. All but one of the games that I loaded on the disc worked (sinistar). There is a chance that I may be taking the machine back to the office. A lot of people really enjoyed it.

Things I would change and or are left to be done:

   1. I would install a hard-drive and run a full os on it if I used the machine at home.
   2. I really need to somehow isolate the headphone and audio amp. It picks up too much EMF noise.
   3. finish the marquee art. I am waiting on this to see where the machine will live.
   4. I need to build the separate 2 player control box.

I am not able to spend much time on this for the next couple of months. I have some other projects that I am committed too for the next 6 to 8 weeks.