After several long weekends and late evenings, it is complete. To design my cabinet, I stole ideas from several cabinets posted here and felt it only fair that I type up this report so perhaps someone else could benefit from my project. I wanted to thank all those guys that I stole ideas from. In particular, there was a great Centipede cabinet with an 8-ball-trackball, an oak 2-piece with black vinyl control panel, Frosty's 2-piece, and many others.
I started out designing a "WarGames" movie themed cab, but after a failed attempt to design my own marquee, I found that I don't have the artistic talent or patience to come up with something presentable. I really have great respect for those guys that build some of the cabinets with the awesome side-art and custom marquees. As my favorite game has always been Joust, it soon became a favorite of my 4-year-old son and pre-teen daughter as well. They thought we should use a Joust marquee and so the project then became "The Joust House".
The PC inside is a DELL 2.4 Ghz Celeron I picked up on
www.delloutlet.com for only $199 plus $40 shipping. Great MAME box, and I simply added another 128MB of memory to make it complete (256MB total). The control panel and cabinet front are covered with black textured vinyl from
www.partsexpress.com. Great stuff, I only wish I had bought 2 rolls as I would have used it in more places had I had more of it. The coin-door was a $20 Ebay purchase that just needed some sanding and painting, it is functional and lit by power run from the PC. T-molding from
www.t-molding.com is 3/4" leather. Monitor is a 22" PC monitor mounted behind plexiglass with a black frame painted on the back.
The control panel is pretty basic stuff with a 3" Imperial trackball, Oscar model 3 spinner, IPAC, Optipac, Ms. Pacman/Galaga reunion stick and a couple 8-way Ultimates. Lots of buttons in various colors to make it easier for the kids.
A smart power-strip from
www.bitsltd.net provides the ability for me to put my PC into stand-by mode and shut down the entire cabinet and have it boot up again in only about 5 seconds. By wiring in a button to my PC power button, I can put my PC into sleep mode which drops the power from the smartstrip which then turns off the marquee light and speakers. Its pretty cool to be able to walk up and hit a button and be playing in 5 seconds.
With the IPAC, I ordered their 3-LED keyboard LED harness. I found that the scroll-lock light is used very little, so I wired that up to my PC's power LED which is cool because when the PC goes on stand-by, I have a red blinking LED on my control panel.
Sound is great with just a couple small speakers mounted up near the marquee, but a sub-woofer inside the cab provides a bit of thump. I chose the speakers I did because it has a nice volume control knob that can be mounted anywhere so I don't have to get out to Windows or pull out the keyboard drawer to turn the volume up or down.
The cab breaks into 3 pieces (bottom, top, control panel) which I actually think made it easier to build as nothing was all that heavy. 3/4" MDF was used throughout. There were a few more cuts to make, and a bit more woodworking involved, but in the end, its much more manageable. The shape is Defenderish, but was really just done freehand. Obviously I used Frosty's and other 2-piece cabinets for inspiration.
As for artwork, I don't know if I will add any or not. With the cab being a 2-piece, I think that somewhat limits what can be done, and with its position in a corner/alcove, I don't know if artwork would add all that much. I tried to paint the sides to match the yellow "JOUST" of the marquee and it came pretty close and almost looks like PacMan yellow.
And now for some pictures...
Dave
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Topic: "The Joust House" is complete (Read 4531 times)
