This project has been a LONG time coming - over 18 months to be honest..!! Unfortunately, we have been doing some fairly major renovations/modifications to our house which has sapped ALL my time. Fortunately though, things in that area are coming to an end and our house is becoming sane.. and Mrs. (to be) Hoopstar is happy once again
Travel back about 5 or 6 years ago when I first stumbled across MAME, I was going to build a 4 player "Lusid" cab just like everyone else seemed to be doing with every button, spinner, trackball and joystick known to man, painted black of course and with poxy MAME side art - a hideous "franken-cab" if you will.
Another project was taking up time back then and so fortunately the delays in starting to build my own cab allowed me to take a step back and rethink the project. I figured that since the majority of games I play are the 80's classics like Galaga and Defender I decided to build and replicate a cabinet that was from that era.. It came down to one of two cabinets - either a Galaga or a Centipede - two games which I remember playing and two games that (IMO) have some of the coolest side art and marquees around in 1982..
Back about 2 years ago I stumbled across
Carlos' Centipede extended and my destiny was set. I started slowly collecting the parts needed to build my own Centipede until now, where I had pretty much everything to kick off my own version of this great cabinet - Enjoy..!!
To start off with, I based my plans on those from
Jakobud's fantastic website and then set about modifying them to suit the larger (deeper) control panel that I wanted to use in the same fashion as Carlos did - unfortunately, I could not get enough information at the time regarding the exact dimensional changes he made - this was very important so I could design my CPO. So I drew out the cabinet on a 3mm sheet of MDF and played around with things until I felt it looked about right. Then I transferred my design to 16mm MDF..
At this stage, one thing became quite clear - these cabinets were designed for 13 year old kids, not grown boys
Being that I am about 6 foot, my eyes would be looking straight into the bright marquee - not ideal to be warping to Earth in Gyruss.!! I needed to raise up the cabinet around 80mm (approx 3") so I needed to modify the bottom of the cabinet.. If you look in the picture above, you'll notice I cut the back corner off at 45 degree because I was intending hiding the castors under the cab..
This made things a little more difficult to do neatly, so I cut the back corners at 90 degrees and made up a couple of pieces to fit exactly to shape - the picture below doesn't really do it justice (most of the line is a pencil mark) but the fit is so tight, I could not get a sheet of paper in between the two pieces.
For increased lateral support, I have added additional internal side bulk heads which run almost the full depth of the cabinet and are attached to the cabs original inner side wall and inside the new lower sections, these are further strengthened with cross braces that also tie into the floor of the cab - the whole thing was glued with "Liquid Nails" and is extremely strong and stable. I will fill the tiny seam latter with Bondo..
Wheels were intially going to be hidden, but some of my other ideas changed how close to the wall the cab could be allowed to go (you'll see more of this later) - a simple solution to both problems is the castors were bolted to a bulk head (80mm x 40mm) that is tied into the cabinet sides and floor, again Liquid Nails builders adhesive was used along with 80mm screws - again, it's strong
The top and lower back panels where cut to sized and fitted - both panels were screwed and glued in place and act as part of the major support for the cab.
The upper back panel allows access to the monitor and is hinged with a
double bearing lock (this cab is ONLY to be used in the home enviroment and therefore no "real" locks are needed)
The next step involved making the light box and integral speaker enclosures..
Step 1. involved making sure the cuts were as close and as accurate as possible.
The next process involved routing the speaker panel so that the splits would flush mount.
And here are the speakers themselves...
I am using twin 4" Peerless mid-woofer speakers - these are magnetically shielded speakers designed for a sealed enclosure. The tweeters are (magnetically shielded) Peerless 1" dome tweeters - their outside mounting OD is 74mm. The total box volume for the mid-woofer is .8 of a litre - this required a LOT of calculation to get right..!!
The "support blocks" around the back of the mid-drivers is because I was forced to use 10mm MDF for the speaker panel to fit the boarder of the marquee in. I had thought about using 16mm MDF and using the router to trim it down, but this proved to be a much neater option. The centre divider panel was a total pain to construct - there is some very funky angles which required a LOT of measuring.. again, the fit is very very tight...!!
The next step just shows the speaker box sealed off using a semi-flexible sealer..
..And the the front panel (light box panel) was fitted to the speaker box section. Note the clips to hold the 18 watt fluro tube and the power cord..
*EDIT: UPDATED LINK TO PICTURE*