Rookie arcade builder's minis

[gijedi]

Here's a threesome of mini arcades.  One was made with the Jakks TV joystick games, one with a Gameboy (so I can easily change games), and the third has a Dreamcast.  Hope the pic comes out...first time posting 

[Jeff AMN]

They look awesome. Do you have any more pics? Perhaps some more showing things up close would be nice.

[gijedi]

Thanks !  Here's a couple more I found.  As soon as I find the rest I'll post them.  I was a dummy and didn't properly rename the files.

[javeryh]

OMG those things are too cute.  How tall are they?

[Chris G]

Those look great!  So I gotta ask - what's with the park?  Are the little cabs not potty-trained yet?  

 
Chris

[gijedi]

They are 4 ft tall,  2 ft deep made from 3/4 plywood.  These pics were taken at a birthday party.

[bleargh]

Oh thats shweeeet. 

Better not let my kids near the computer any more; they'll find this in my browse history and want me to build them some...

Plans?

[gijedi]

As far as plans....they were built on the fly with lots of trial and error.  I did the outline of each arcade freehand and then hoped for the best.  The hardest one to build was the Dreamcast one as the CP was bought on eBay and I wasn't sure about its dimensions so I guessed when cutting.  I got the idea for these from a website I found while researching Arcades. 

btw the potty training at the park comment was really funny 

[IG-88]

Could you give me some more details on how you did the gameboy one? Hardware & software specs and such?

[ElKootcho]

Could you give me some more details on how you did the gameboy one? Hardware & software specs and such?

I'm curious about that as well. Details would be great.

[gijedi]

hello everyone

The Gameboy cab was made by hacking a GBA Advance and connecting those to the buttons (pic included).  A 13" TV was used as the monitor and a GBA TV adapter (bought on eBay) was used to send the video signal to the TV.  The onscreen picture was slightly smaller than the TV screen but it looked pretty good.  The GBA adapter also had sound output which was connected to the TV.  The hard part was soldering the wires on the GBA because the terminals were very small.  Once soldered I had to put some hot glue on them so they wouldn't move. Here's a pic of the GBA soldering points.

I just checked eBay under gba tv and there's like 4 of these up for bids...the bottom pic is from one of those auctions.

[IG-88]

Thats pretty cool! This may seem like a dumb question but why hack your gameboy when you could emulate it and just use the roms of the games you own?

[gijedi]

I didn't have an extra pc for emulation but I did have an extra GBA that my kids didn't want.  This was just going to be a dedicated gba mini arcade for the kids to play with and the parts were either cheap or I already had.....plus it was a cool project    Also these were built a couple of years ago before I got into Mame and other emulators.

Thanks for the comments and replies.

[horseboy]

I am pretty sure he used a GBA to tv adapter. These are pretty rare, but they are around.

[danny_galaga]

very cool cabs. i guess, as something in that second pic was distracting me