here i am , a long time lurker , born in the mid sixties and allways looking for new ideas or tech advise . i have to admit , this forum is the best resource on videoarcade related stuff in the world. now i guess its about time to show some of the projects i finished in the recent past. lets start with the rebuild of a astro fighter ( donkey kong modded ) lowboy a buddy from a german forum bought some time ago . since this type of cabs are really rare in europe and theres nearly no chance of aquiring one ,i decided to build one from scratch . i found the style of this thing very appealing . fortunately the owner measured all essential parts and drawed the sides on some sandwich paper , so templating the sides was easy going.
i recycled a lot of crap electronic parts dumped in my garage ( 10 euro ebay tv ,old poker panel ,scrapwood ,broken usb pad , old dell p4 barbone, old cab speaker, sticks n buttons , plexi ), coz i didnt want it to break the barrier of a few hundred bucks. the expensive part was the aluminum frame , usually used for a bird aviary . i tried it for a cocktail table and was very satisfied with the outcome, coz its rock solid . the 1 inch aluminum square tubes plus the plastic connectors came out around 5o euro . the beechwood parts were painted with acrylic ebony paint (3 times ). the artworks were ordered in a local electronic market ( 7 euro ) and the dell comp is running mame with soft 15 k and mamescart cable . in the future i plan to replace it with a mak and a genuine arcade pcb. the building process took a while but was fun . the gameplay on this style of cabinet is better than 99 % of all cocktail arcades i encountered. i will never understand why so many people choose the road of a pacman style table arcade with all its disadvantages.