Ikeamame, a slim upright cabinet, completed

[fivslt]

Hello all!

After lurking here for about one year gathering
information, I'm presenting the fruits of my labour:
a slim upright cabinet. I don't know what to call
it, but Ikeamame was the first thing that came to mind,
because of the minimalistic, cheap and furniture-like
style. The profile of the cabined is based on Moon
Patrol (thanks jakobud!), with the marquee removed
and an inch shaved off the bottom ant two from the back.
The width is 660 mm (26 inches) to allow room for the
monitor to turn. I used two U360's, two Spintracks and
ipac-ve and opti-pac boards. The products and the service
at ultimarc are excellent!

Construction time: about 100 hours, within a span of
5 weeks.

Features:

- Manually rotating 20.1 inch LCD monitor (HP LP2065) with
  178/178 viewing angles. The screen is bolted to a round
  piece of plexi, which rotates between two layers of
  plywood.

- Almost paint-free construction by using white 18 mm (3/4 inch)
  melamine particle board and 6.5 mm (1/4 inch) plywood covered
  with black tolex.

- Can be disassembled (Hence the ugly bolts at the sides!)

- Unorthodox button placement (player buttons under the
  joysticks). This layout is symmetric, gives lots of room
  for trackball, is good for gravitar and asteroids,
  good for classic one player games (I'm using the other
  player buttons) and not too bad (opinions vary) for most
  two player games.

- Foot buttons to compensate for top fire/triggers.

- 2.25 inch trackball, the cover of which is removed to allow
  the ball to rise up as far as possible, just so that the
  encoder disks do not touch the mounting plate.

- Two spinners for super sprint etc, placed symmetrically
  over the joysticks.

- Small footprint 59 x 66 cm (23 times 26 inches)

- Doubles as a second computer (keyboard drawer and
  trackball with buttons close enough for comfortable
  work, two USB ports and a DVD drive at front)

- 2x16 character LCD screen on the control panel. It now
  shows the CPU and memory usage. Does anybody have any
  suggestions for better use of it?

Software:

Ubuntu 8.4 64 bit, SDLMame 0.124, Wahcade 0.23 (frontend)

Price:

Controls:            500 euros
Wood:                  60 euros
Tolex:                   40 euros
Hardware, etc. : 100 euros
Computer:              0 euros (pre-existing second computer)

Pictures:

[Blanka]

Come On Mr Europe!
We should make the Americans trash their inches, not FOLLOW their wackiness! Clean up your post please and millimeterise it! Pleazzzzee 

And I think the circle should not be visible. You might wanna redesign the bezel bit.

[fivslt]

Oh well...

26 inches = about 660 mm
3/4 inch = about 18 mm
1/4 inch = about 6.5 mm

The measurements in the plans are metric, though 
 
(updated the original post also)

[Singapura]

I was hoping you'd turned an IKEA bookcase into a Mame cabinet. I've been considering that myself 

[fivslt]

And I think the circle should not be visible. You might wanna redesign the bezel bit.

The rotating plexi circle is behind the outer layer of plywood. The circle that you see is a hole cut to the outer layer. There is no way to make the hole some other shape because the outer layer does not rotate with the plexi layer. So I would say, the shape is inherent and optimal for this design, although maybe not pretty...

Mod: Ok, I guess Blanka is right and it would be possible to have a square shaped
bezel.

[Blanka]

Thought more of something like this:
plexi with black paint on the back with a square transparant
rotating black plastic bezel between monitor and plexi.

[fivslt]

Ok, thanks.

I can't put the plexi at the front because of the two handles attached to the
rotating part. I could cut a hole to the front "bezel" layer, similar to the square
transparent hole in your suggestion, but then I would have to attach the monitor
differently to the rotating layer so that there would be no bolts at the left and
right side of the monitor. Anyway, a good suggestion, optimal for
motorized mechanism and probably possible to adapt for manual mechanism.

[fivslt]

I was hoping you'd turned an IKEA bookcase into a Mame cabinet. I've been considering that myself 

Heh, I wonder how that would work. In a way I did not start from scratch, because I had to cut only the angled and curved parts for the sides from pre-cut rectangular pieces. (I used a jigsaw and sanded down the last millimeter to the line to avoid chipping of the melamine.) All other parts were rectangular, and I did not have to cut them. This sped up the process quite a lot.

[SavannahLion]

- 2x16 character LCD screen on the control panel. It now
  shows the CPU and memory usage. Does anybody have any
  suggestions for better use of it?

I can't think of a whole lot....

Scrolling the name of the current game being played

Virtual coin counter.
or
A statistics display. eg How many hours of game time.

Is it color? A super simple marquee.

A very very tiny screen with an attract mode.

That's about it out of me. 

[fivslt]

Thanks. I had similar ideas. Also, maybe it could show game instructions. I'll have to find an inverter for the backlight first, because now it is a bit hard to read. It is an old electroluminescence backlight, and would need 120 V about 400 Hz AC. I'm not very familiar with those. Probably ten years ago those were very common, but now I can't find them in local electronics shops. The LCD unit was just something that I had laying around, and I thought that I could finally use it in this project.