Mini versus City

[infiniteomega]

Okay, so I've been lusting after a japanese "candy" cab for a while ,but since I haven't been able to get my hands on one I've decided to go ahead and build my own.  Initially I wanted to use a 27" multisync like everyone else around here, but after mocking up my first design I found that normal sized cabs just weren't going to fit in the amount of space I have to work with.  While finding that out was a bit disheartening, all I could do about was to go back to the drawing board.  The best solution I could think of was to make a cabinet that was deep, but not wide.

Here's what I came up with:


The idea spawned from equal parts Jaleco pony 3 (Thanks Penrhos from killercabs.com):


And Versus City (Thanks Candy Cabinet City):



I'm going to be going with 19" monitors for the cabinets.  For that I went a bit off of the beaten path and ordered a Well Gardner D9500.  No one could give me any info about it (or the Billabs model that is similar), but I knew I wanted a multisync monitor, and I knew it had to be 19" to be viable due to the space constraints.  Hopefully it turns out to be a winner for everything I want to play now, and in the near future (mostly fighters and shmups). 

I'm going to build this cabinet as 2 single player cabinets first, and then join them together.  The image will be displayed on both monitors by way of a video signal splitter.  Right now I have one monitor on order and will be ordering my controls shortly.  I'm probably going to go with seimitsu sticks and buttons.  There are a lot of things I haven't really decided on as I don't want to get started on the actual cabinet construction until I have the monitor and I'm not entirely sure when that will be.

Just as a semi proof of concept, here's a picture of my cardboard mockup of one of the halves (sorry it's so blurry):


I'm sure there are lots of things I haven't thought all the way through, but seeing as how I'm just getting started, I hope to sort through them all before I get into the contruction phase.

Thanks for looking...

[NiteWalker]

Interesting idea. I was thinking about making my first cabinet in this style but decided against it because of space limitations.  Also 19" is nice I'm sure. but I personally would've opted for 25" at least. So far so good though.

[IG-88]

I've also had a similar idea recently but using a Nintendo vs. cocktail cab. Have you thought of the possibility of 2 people being able to play separate games at the same time? I wonder how hard it would be to set up both ideas?

[infiniteomega]

It would have been able to go bigger, but 25" monitors that are multisync are nowhere to be found, and I didn't have enough room for a 27" so a 25" would probably still be too big.  Like I said, I originally wanted to  do a 27" 2 player sit down.  Ah well...

Setting each cabinet up for individual operation wouldn't be all that hard I don't think.  I'd just need to give the second cab a switch that would allow its controls and monitor to be connected to the first cab's hardware rather than its own.

I've been pondering on a theme for the cabinets.  For the most part I'm a minimalist so I was either going to simply make one white w/ black controls and one black with white controls.  And then I started thinking about the whole  versus idea and Spy vs Spy came to mind.  I'm not really sure I'm going to run with that, but it had crossed my mind.

[SteveJ34]

....
I've been pondering on a theme for the cabinets.  For the most part I'm a minimalist so I was either going to simply make one white w/ black controls and one black with white controls.  And then I started thinking about the whole  versus idea and Spy vs Spy came to mind.  I'm not really sure I'm going to run with that, but it had crossed my mind.

Oooo....

I like the Spy vs Spy art concept!

[infiniteomega]

Got my monitor!  I haven't actually plugged it in, or turned it on yet.  I'm kind of holding off until I actually have something suitable setup to hook it up to.  That and I don't have an extra vga cable to hook it up to anything with (doh...will have one tomorrow though). 

Here's a picture of it (I am not a good photographer):


They only offer the horizontal mount when you order it, but I figured I was okay since they say you can move the mouting hardware from the bottom mount location to the sides of the monitor.  Well, the holes are there, but they aren't tapped.  So I'll have to take the mounts off and tap the holes I want to mount it since there's no way I can even attempt rotating it fi it's bolted down to a monitor shelf.  Of course, I didn't even notice the lack of taps on the alternative mounting holes before I unscrewed the mounts (which were a major pain to do with a screwdriver btw). 

Any suggestions?