The Dreadnought, a Star Wars Mame Pedestal

[Markades]

The Dreadnought

This is a MAME arcade cabinet pedestal that I built for a coworker.  It was built by myself and a friend last year over 3 months in my garage.  The TL;DR is mostly contained in the imgur album. 

The cabinet is all handmade from pine and plywood, all edges and radii were hand sanded around a dozen times each, and not routed. It is trimmed on all four sides in matching "Death Star Lighting Panels" that were made from 1x12 and painted in contrasting colors.  There were 16 unique, non-interchangeable pieces of trim all made from a singe board each.

The interior shelves contain fans and slide in and out for connection of cables and components, hold the computer, and have room to store extra systems, components, or controllers. The control panel is easily accessible and provides extra storage for peripherals.  The lighting board for the front panel also slides out for service/upgrades.  The entire unit breaks down into 2 pieces via a few screws for easier transport loading, with convenient disconnects for all electronics. 

 The front panel lights up using RGB LED strips and is remote controllable for animations or user programmable colors and intensity and speed.

the computer is a mini ITX Core I3 3.2 Ghz, 8GB ram, 1TB HDD, Win7 64Bit,  It uses 3 120 mm case fans to circulate the air and remove heat from the inside of the cabinet and CPU that are automatically temperature controlled using the power supply exiting temp. It uses Maximus arcade front end, emulates MAME, NES, SNES, and Genesis. 

The wiring harness was handmade, crimped, soldered, insulated, color coded, run, terminated, bundled, loomed, installed and reinstalled and reinstalled, and reinstalled.  The vinyl CP overlay was cropped from the original star wars movie poster and retouched and printed on laminated vinyl, then covered in 1/4" plexi.

 All the action buttons have custom designed and CNC cut vinyl inlays mounted inside the buttons, including Vader Player 1 start and Han/Leia player 2 start, and administrative buttons.  The controls are all Seimitsu (LS-58-01 joysticks and PS14 KN pushbuttons, recessed into the backside of the control panel wired to an Ipac controller.  There is also expansion via a wireless XBOX controller receiver for console or 3/4 player TMNT/Simpsons or XMEN 6 player action. 

It was hand finished using a piano black technique of flat black and white latex paint covered in at least a dozen coats of sprayed on lacquer, sanded and wet sanded between coats.  It has adjustable legs that allow passage of power and communication cables and air flow into and out of the cabinet.

It required somewhere between 400-500 man hours of labor to complete. 

It is currently installed in a coworkers home Star Wars themed bar.

[CoryBee]

 

Epic wiring! If you would have painted the underside it could be 10x prettier!

[PL1]

Great looking build!

Love the Han + Leia Button insert.   



(white figure + up-curve on lower edge of helmet + curve on corners of helmet => stormtrooper)

If you do decide to re-do the "stormtrooper-like" Vader insert, maybe use:
- The same black background
- A thick white outline outside current white figure,
- Current white figure in black
- Lower edge of the helmet dipping slightly to sharp corners so it looks more like the pic below



Adding a thin outline for his cape might help, or it might be overkill.   


Scott

[Markades]

Those weren't the final pics.  We actually painted all the sides except for the very bottom, where both builders signed it.  I just didn't have any of the final ones that were low enough resolution to post here until now.  Please check out the build log for all of the really good pics at

http://imgur.com/a/VDqrY

This cabinet was also just featured on Hackaday!  http://hackaday.com/2013/01/08/star-wars-themed-mame-cabinet-is-perfect-in-this-basement-bar/#comment-935996