Steel tabletop cab

[grumdrig]

Hi folks! I'm building a tabletop arcade cab in sort of an open clamshell shape out of 16 gauge stainless steel. I haven't worked with metal very much and I'm learning to TIG weld, so I decided to overbuild this for the sake of practice.

This'll be my second cabinet. The first a coworker and I built to go into the lobby of the place we worked, years ago. We put a CRT in a upright MDF cabinet. Much Robotron ensued.

I don't have a good drawing that is amenable to being photographed. All I have is this sketch:



It'll be thinner than that though - only about 2 1/2" deep in both the horizontal and vertical sections.

For this one I'm using a 19" LCD donated by my brother. It's quite heavy. I've removed the casing and here it is with the bezel I welded together sitting on it. It'll be 3/4" thick which is about the minimum I could probably make it.



For brains, there's not much room, and I don't want a fan, so I'll probably use AdvMAME on a Raspberry Pi. It seems to run the games I have in mind reasonably well, mostly. I have a BeagleBone black which I'll probably try out too. Much faster CPU but much slower graphics, so I don't know how that will work.

Here's a mockup of the control panel:



No fighting games buttons. I'm going to keep the games list well-edited. I want just these to start with:
- Defender
- Galaga
- Joust
- Robotron
- Asteroids

I'll leave it there for now and post more details (and hopefully progress) later. Any feedback is very welcome!

[Well Fed Games]

Sweet. How do you interface controls to the Pi?

[CoryBee]

Sweet. How do you interface controls to the Pi?

[Well Fed Games]

Well done, sir.

[grumdrig]

Sweet. How do you interface controls to the Pi?

I'm using an I-PAC 2.

[CoryBee]

Well done, sir.

 

[grumdrig]

Well played indeed!

Incidentally, I tried various different buttons and I really like the feedback of the old Happ controls best. But they're too deep so I'll be using shallower Gold Leaf buttons.

I also switched from the MagStick to the ServoStick (all this is from Ultimarc) for the same reason. Instead of using the servos, though, I'm planning to put a knob above the joysticks to switch between 4-way and 8-way modes.

[Rick]

Dean Winchester does not approve of your shenanigans.

[CoryBee]