My latest ebay acquisition: vintage bartop "Little Casino"

[DrumAnBass]

Ok so I picked this thing up on ebay last week. It is a working (well sort of) "Little Casino II" bartop from Digital Controls circa 1984. The game itself s pretty lame... The illuminated buttons do have a cool attract sequence programmed in.  But I figure I can turn it into something much cooler...! It has a 9" CRT which runs at 416 x 256 pixels, 60.00 Hz according to arcade-history.com. Right now it has vertical hold issues - the image wants to roll no matter how you tweak the v-hold knob.

So any suggestions? I was thinking to try and cram a mini-ITX pc in there and attempt to run advanceCD off a CF card using a CF to IDE adaptor. I haven't had time to take it apart to see how much room I have to play with.  Definitely thinking to build a little CP with a joystick and a few buttons- CP area is 2.5" x 9". Maybe repaint it and add some side and CP graphics...

Any suggestions on the v-hold issue? What joystick would you guys recommend going with? Part of me thinks keep it simple and just go for a Ms Pac reunion 4 way; the other part says go for something more extravagant that is software restricted.

What do you guys think? Pix:

[leapinlew]

I have a similar unit that I'm going to turn into a jukebox.

[danny_galaga]

on the joystick question, how about that mini sanwa thing mentioned somewhere else here? i suspect a normal joy might look too goofy...

[shardian]

Put a TT2 spinner and a few buttons on there.

[DrumAnBass]

Yah a little Sanwa would be cool for it; any one know the model number? Don't think I want to spend the money on a TT2 spinner, going to try and do this pretty low budget.

Aesthetically I am thinking maybe spray the case white and go with mini Galaga side art...?

I did find a cheap 9" SVGA monitor (1024x768) on ebay right now; thinking about snapping that up and replacing the existing monitor just to avoid the hassle of trying to get onboard video to send the right frequency (no room inside for an AVGA card). That way I could also run standard PC games for my kids, and wouldn't have to worry about fixing the vert hold issue...

[leapinlew]

Sounds like the cabinet I just made. I used a 9" VGA and a normal joystick looked just fine. I wouldn't paint it white though. Here is a link to some completed photos

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=68683.msg719184#msg719184

[DrumAnBass]

Yah yours is a work of art leapinlew!!! I don't think this little fugly box will ever look like yours, but it certainly gives me inspiration! I hardly have any free time these days so I was trying to eliminate the woodworking portion of the build, sacrificing the "custom" look.