Neo's arcade machine [WIP]

[neohusky]

Background

I’ve been toying with notion of building a MAME machine for many years.  I don’t know what the trigger was but something clicked a few months ago and I got buried into researching designs and concepts.  This forum was an invaluable reference.

I’m reasonably competent in woodworking, but, after looking at some of the examples on this forum I wasn’t confident enough to create the quality of finish that many fellow members on this site have produced.

A friend of mine stumbled upon a website offering flat pack arcade cabinets. Arcadeworx's cabinet designs were sleek, modern and relatively compact which kinda met my brief and would fit with the decor in the house.

This project has been on-going over the past few months and it would not do it justice to rush this topic i a single post. I will update this topic as frequently as I can with the steps of the build thus far.

[neohusky]

After extensive conversations with Troy from Arcadeworx a 2player cabinet was the obvious choice for me. It's not often that I have large groups of guys over that all want to play at the same time.  All my mates and I were really into the 2 player fighters in particular Street Fighter.

There were many decisions that needed to be made after I had chosen my cabinet design.  A completed cabinet on the Arcadeworx caught my eye.  The illuminated cutouts looked awesome. After seeing LEDBlinky in action I knew I had to illuminate cutouts with RGB LEDs on my cabinet. I settled for 2 cutouts: The marquee (ARCADE) and the front door (Street Fighter logo).

The biggest challenge was coming up with a layout of the control panel.  After much research and look at hundreds of Cps I finally settled on the following design:



The CP was to have 2 Ultimarc U360s and was to use 20 Paradise Arcade Clear IL Translucent Pushbuttons.

Orders were placed respectively with Ultimarc and Paradise Arcade.




Damn Nephasth and his wreched Two-Headed Beast.  Nephasth is an artist and his attention to detail on his masterpiece is amazing. From Nephasth's project I decided to use the following ideas:

• The pushbutton mod creating a "ring" of light mean't I had to order a full set of black pushbuttons to complement the clear ones which increased the cost a little. But, the final result Nephasth achieved was just awesome.
  
  
• I was also using the Paradise Arcade's RGB LEDs and so had to drill out cable exits out of the base of the pushbuttons as Nephasth and others have described
• I also found Nephasth's use of Molex connector and his wiring harness very neat and so arranged molex connectors as described in his topic

[neohusky]

I had chosen to use rollie leaf switch from Paradise Arcade. Unfortunately, these did not work well with the RGBLEDs and required a modification to the switch:



While I was prototyping the CP and finalising design of the cabinet I had to make a decision on the monitor size. I had spent weeks looking at front ends to run MAME and none were as appealing to me as Hyperspin in all its glory.  This meant that it would have to be a widescreen monitor.  Troy from Arcadeworx was recommending a 24" widescreen, however, I felt that was a little too small (in vertical height). Troy was hesitant for me to use a 27" monitor as there were limitations in the cabinet design.  The only way a 27" monitor would fit would be if it was decades.  Even then there's a chance that it may not fit.

I took the chance and purchased an AOC 27.0" Full HD Widescreen 1920x1820 2ms LED Monitor

Overview
Plug & Play: DDC1 / 2B / CI
User Control: Power On / Off, Vol. + / -, Menu, Source
OSD Languages: 14
Speaker: Yes
Wallmount: Yes
Height adjustment: No
Pivot: No
Swivel: No
Specifications
Line: LED
Paneltype: MVA
Monitor Size: 27.0"
Visible Screen Size: 68.8cm
Screen Format: 16:9
Brightness: 300 cd/m�
Contrast Ratio: 20.000.000:1 (DCR)
Pixel / Dot / Pitch: 311.25 (H) x 311.25 (V)
Display Area: 597.6 (H) x 336.15 (V)
Viewing Angle: 178� / 178� (CR ?10)
Response Time: 2 ms (GtG)
Maximum Resolution: 1920 x 1080@60 Hz
Recommend Resolution: 1920 x 1080@60 Hz
Colors: 16.7 M
HDCP compatible: Yes
Analogue Input: D-Sub: Yes
Digital Input: DVI-D / HDMI: Yes / Yes
Composite CVBS Input: No
Component CVBS Input: No
S-Video Input: No
Component Input: No
SCART: No
CI Card: No
D-Sub 15 pin: Yes
DVI-D 24-pin: Yes
HDMI: Yes
Dimensions (WxHxD): 642 x 439.2 x 209.9
Weight: 7.0 kg /8.9 kg




Once it arrive I immediately went to work removing the case





I sent the decased dimensions to Troy who agreed to design the cab for this monitor.

The final detail to decide was the finish of the MDF on the cabinet.  Arcadeworx offered 3 finishes: raw MDF, satin black, gloss white.  Most of my decor is contemporary gloss white  and I was a little biased towards it.  I looked at the option of painting the raw MDF gloss white and after a some discussion with friends it was felt by all that it would be very difficult to obtain a nice gloss finish on the MDF. The gloss white option from Arcadeworx is a laminate finish.  So again my personal lack of confidence led to me cheating again and going for the pre-finished option. Also, a laminate finish would add a level of durability especially when little nieces and nephews are running around.


This was the final design decision and so the order with arcadeworx was placed.  Aracadeworx is based in Perth on the other side of the country. It took about a week and half and the cabinet was CNC cut packed and shipped across the country. I received the delivery and felt like a child at christmas 



As soon as I opened the carton I was amazed!  Troy had done an awesome job.  Every piece was perfect.  The cabinet assembled as easily as a piece of furniture from IKEA.






The cabinet remained this way for several weeks.  There were some minor delays in parts for the control panel so I took this time to carefully layout and plan the remainder of the project.

[emphatic]

Wow, that's a nice kit! 

[TopJimmyCooks]

Sweet kit- kudos to arcadeworx.  Are you thinking of some rgb leds for the marquee backlight, or just keeping it a solid color?  I would consider it since you're already into led controllers. 

[neohusky]

Here's a sneak peak into the future.

[TopJimmyCooks]

My man. 

[neohusky]

I've just finished toying with the lightbox and now looking at creating the lightshow for testing before moving onto the front door.

LEDBlinky has a cabinet lighting feature,but, is limited as many users haven't shown much interest. If anyone thinks independant cabinet lighting control based on FE events would be useful then head over to the software forum and add your support to my post. Arzoo is keen to see how many people are actually  interested in this little feature.

[yotsuya]

Yeah, I had to do that wih my Rollie leafs as well. Ended up breaking one trimming it.

[neohusky]

I was lucky also as I had only broken 1 out of 20. At the time I also didn't have my dremel tool. In retrospect if I had used the right tool it would have been a neater job and probably wouldn't have broken a single one.

[Nephasth]

I gotta say, that is one beautiful kit! I never heard of Arcade Worx before, probably because it's an Australian based company, but it seems that they offer some top quality stuff! I've been really anxious to see your project for the past couple months, and it looks like you've done an awesome job! I cheated and checked out your pics posted in the "not a project" thread. You've put everything together cleanly, and it gives a very slick look. It's great to see that button combo on another project, as well as those Micro-fit connectors! Seeing your cabinet lighting makes me want to get mine done. A couple of questions, how have you set up your LEDBlinky? I noticed you've got NeoGeo lit up the appropriate colors, and that is one I've had problems with (automatically anyway). Are you using colors.ini? If you are, did you have to make a manual color profile for NeoGeo games in LEDBlinky, or modify controls.ini? I've found that by adding missing games to controls.ini that are in colors.ini, they'll light up correctly, but I'm wondering if there might be a problem with my setup if yours was pretty much automatic.

Anyway, you've got a very nice cab, so clean...