Another minicade

[Lance]

After seeing the minicade that menace built I was motivated to try building my own.  I'm not even close to being done but here is the progress so far (the images are clickable).

So we started out with a 4x8 sheet of MDF:


Ripped it to a 2x8 sheet:


Cut that into 4 2 foot lengths (we are building two of these):


Made a cardboard template for the shape of the minicade:


Cut two sides and rounded the corners:


Installed strips to hold the top and sides:


Another view of the sides:

[dmsuchy]

Looks great, that a hell of a shop you got there! You could start production if you wanted.

[menace]

looking good!  I'm curious what your control panel is going to end up looking like--it looks shorter.  something like this guys--mini-pac http://www.geocities.com/emu_skeleton/minimame.htm

keep us up to date with lots of pics!

[Edgedamage]

Here's an idea my work has most of the computers in different rooms than the keyboard and mouse and monitor.
What they use is 30 foot cables. One could build a full size cabinet in their games room and on the bar 20 feet away have their mini mame machine running on the same computer with a KVM switcher and VGA switcher. Cables and switchers are cheaper than two comps. Anyway to all the mini cab builders in the last months great work they all  
look great.

[Lance]

looking good!  I'm curious what your control panel is going to end up looking like--it looks shorter.  something like this guys--mini-pac http://www.geocities.com/emu_skeleton/minimame.htm

keep us up to date with lots of pics!

Thanks for the link, haven't seen that one before.  I am planning on doing something pretty close to that mini pac though.

[Lance]

Here's an idea my work has most of the computers in different rooms than the keyboard and mouse and monitor.
What they use is 30 foot cables. One could build a full size cabinet in their games room and on the bar 20 feet away have their mini mame machine running on the same computer with a KVM switcher and VGA switcher. Cables and switchers are cheaper than two comps. Anyway to all the mini cab builders in the last months great work they all  
look great.

This will just be running vantage so I'm just putting in an old junker Pentium inside of it.

[paigeoliver]

Here's an idea my work has most of the computers in different rooms than the keyboard and mouse and monitor.
What they use is 30 foot cables. One could build a full size cabinet in their games room and on the bar 20 feet away have their mini mame machine running on the same computer with a KVM switcher and VGA switcher. Cables and switchers are cheaper than two comps. Anyway to all the mini cab builders in the last months great work they all  
look great.

I can usually get a decent Mame computer for $20 or $30, that is certainly cheaper than a KVM switcher, a VGA switcher, and the long cables required. Of the 5 mame cabinets I have the most expensive computer inside one of them cost me $80 and the cheapest was $19.