My Arcade Cab

My Story:
So after maybe 2 years of lurking the arcadecontrols.com message boards, a LOT of deliberation and finally a couple of weeks of building, it's finally at a point where I can show it to the world: My built-from-scratch Arcade Cab!!

I really was never much of a arcade hall kid (I'm Dutch and there are hardly any arcade venues in the Netherlands). Somehow I got really intrigued by the controls and the retro-look of the cabs on this forum. After lurking here for a couple of months, I was completely hooked. Convinced the gf and started planning :)

Since the cab had to be placed in our living room (yes, the girlfriend totally rocks!) I really wanted a nice, clean and relatively small cab. I mainly like fighter and platform games so I just wanted a 2 joystick, 6 button-per-player setup. I doubted for a long time about the cab design before going with the Pacman/Galaga shapes. Now that it's finished, I'm REALLY glad I went with this cab design: I love the shapes of my cab!

The second consideration was cost: I wanted to do this on a small budget and I guess it worked out as well: I friend donated a second hand computer and I found a free 22'' monitor on the Web. Buttons, joystick and the Ultimarc I-PAC I had shipped over from oklahoma :) for about 80 Euros. Wood and paint cost me about 100 Euros and with some miscellaneous costs the total was something like 200 Euros (310 dollars).

Some specifications:

• The cab was built with 18mm multiplex, which makes it pretty heavy but nice and sturdy :)
  
• It's 1m70cm tall, 61cm wide and 80cm deep
  
• Inside is a 2.4 Ghz 512MB PC, hooked up to the buttons through an Ultimarc I-Pac
  
• The monitor is a 22'' pc monitor, with the back part of the casing removed. The front part is painted black.
  
• The controls: 1 happ competition joystick and 6 happ buttons per player plus the 1p and 2p buttons
• The temporary Bubble Bobble Marquee is lit by a simple lightbulb. This looks fine to me.
  
• The control panel opens to reveal the wires, the keyboard and mouse and the power button.
  
• I don't have t-molding (pretty expensive to ship and install and I don't really miss it). The edges are rounded though and I think it looks really nice :)
  

Cab construction
I decided to build the Cab itself from scratch. We first determined the minimum width, depth and height of the cab. Then I sketched some shabby plans and we basically started sawing. We first did the sides, since they were probably the most crucial shape-wise. We then did the back, top and front-panel, thus ending up with the empty box. The Control panel is somewat of a 'piece the resistance' , it is nicely rounded in front and can be opened for easy access to the interior without it feeling 'loose'.
Mounting the monitor was by far the hardest part, as the monitor arrived fairly late in the project and by then I wanted it almost horizontal and sunken into the cab. After a couple of tries we nailed it. It now rests on a piece of wood that is connected to the sides as well as to the floor. The rest was fairly straightforward compared to the monitor althought the Marquee holder took us some though. In the end we went with two slits in both the top and bottom part of the cab top. The print is held by two pieces of plexi that fit into these slits.

Software
The PC runs windows XP. On startup it boots the MaLa as a frontend to good-old MAME. MaLa is a very nice frontend that allows you to very easily construct nice navigation menu's based on game features or personal preferences.

Todo
It's basically 90% finished. Some things that still need to be done:

• A new printed marquee (now its two prints glued together, looks okay but can be better). I'll have to think about a marquee design first.
  
• Restore and install a very cool coin door I bought off the Internet
  
• Think about cp- bezel- and side-art. I'm not to sure I want this, I kinda like the 'sophisticated' look of the cab as it stands now, what do you guys think?
  

Very Special Thanks:

• My buddy Jurriaan, for donating his old PC to me.
  
• All you guys and gals on the Arcadecontrols.com forum! You are the ones that made me drool all over your nice cabs and made me crazy about retro-gaming and building this monster :)
  
• My lovely girlfriend, for being crazy enough to allow the beast in her living room
  
• And last but not least, her father. He is the whole reason this project actually worked out. He had the technical know-how, the tools, and most importantly, the patience with me that made the whole plan a reality. So: Thanks Rob!

Please let me know what you think of the cab and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Youtube vid: