Arcade Blaster, first cabinet

[namedos]

I'm building an Ultimate Arcade II as I had the plans with Saint's book and I didn't want to build my first cab from my own design.  Name of the cabinet is Arcade Blaster.  I did customize the keyboard tray with magnetic catch and a piano hinge to make it more seamless.

It has a two player control panel with Perfect 360's, Happs trackball, tornado spinner and a 4-way joystick.  I finished the construction of the control panel but I'm not satisfied with how it turned out so I'm going to build another one and not drill it out until I have the artwork and plexiglass.  Used an Ultimarc 4 as the keyboard interface to make sure that I didn't limit my options in the future.  Trackball and spinner are both USB connected.

I will have a coin door and I'm looking to use a tasteful number of LED's to light the coin door and control panel.

The artwork is being custom designed and drawn by a local kid and I'm planning on using Mame Marquees to print up most of it.  The primary color scheme is Red, Silver and dark gray.  I have laminate in all three colors but haven't decided on how the art will all come together.

I have Mamewah running on the PC now as I liked the ability to customize the look of it fairly easily.

I'm planning on using a Betson 27" monitor hooked up with Ultimarc VGA but I still need to purchase these.

Speakers are Creative Labs 2.1 and I'm not going to use speaker grills but rather put speaker cloth over the entire section and hold it in place with 1/4 molding.

I do have many pictures with the progress so far.  I will not post them here but I am working on setting up a website.  First time I have done that so it is interesting and will take me a little bit of time.

[namedos]

Well I've completed about 95% of the construction on my first cabinet and it has been a blast.   I made a few modifications to the standard UAII plan.  First, I used some hardware from Rocker which allows the front panel of the keyboard tray to drop down and act as a small shelf and makes it very easy to type.  I didn't like the knob look for something that I hopefully won't use much.  I also modified the speaker area.  Used some quarter molding and some speaker cloth which makes a big speaker cover over the whole area.

I wanted to go with a different color scheme than blue and black and I like the color combination that I have put together.  The sides and front are all laminated.

The biggest hurdle still to go is the artwork.  I did have a local kid do some of this but I found out that I didn't have enough of a theme in mind.  At this time I'm trying my own hand at it.  I found this book on the internet and it is the same type of format that I want to use for the side art and marquee as Anime Explosion.

I have some USB ports that I will be adding to the front.  I have an Act Labs light gun on pre-order and I still need to find a holster for it.  The control panel will be redone once I have the artwork completed.  I really like the Perfect 360 joysticks.  For my 4-way I've tried an Ultimarc T-Stick plus - didn't like the feel of it, had a Wico Leaf NOS but didn't like the length of the throw, now I have a super with Groovy Game Gear shaft and knob.  I am looking for a heavy duty spring but so far I like the feel of it.  When I redo my control panel I will clean up all the wiring.

This last weekend I picked up an Act Labs RS steering wheel, shifter and foot pedals including the clutch.  Found a good deal on Craigs List as they were going for around $200 on ebay.  I've also been trying to get a Pole position steering wheel as I will be building another control panel for driving games.

I have one of Gamecabs LED boards that I still need to hook up to drive the player one and player two lights.  I did install a Vandal Switch on the side to power on and off the pc.  Creative speakers are great and I really like having easy access to the volume control.

I did end up going with the Betson 27" multisynch monitor and so far I love it.  Picture is great quality and HUGE.  Really blows my friends away with how good that makes it look. 

I kept having problems with Mamewah so I switched to 3DArcade and it has worked very well for me.  I've got Mame and Kawaks running so far and will be adding Visual Pinball next week.  The FPS arcade was really amazing but for ease of use I've switched to a cylinder setup.  Software is something that I will probably be tweaking for the next year.

Thanks to Saint for his book and to all of you who asked my questions and allowed me to keep building.  Andy at Ultimarc and Randy at Retroblast  have also been very helpful with many of my questions.

My family has been playing Track and Field, Puzzle Bobble, fighting games and Hamsterball over the past week.  It feels really good to hear my kids friends come over and get excited about putting tokens in the machine and it actually works.

I'm still trying to build a website as I have a lot more pictures and I have a lot of documentation of what I built along the way.  Let me know if you have any questions.

[markrvp]

Good job.  Looks nice.

[Apollo]

Very nice, congrats.