The Arcade Machine

[AndyC]

Well, here it is, almost done. It still needs a door on the back, the monitor bezel needs to be covered in acrylic (it's just laminated paper), and I need to figure out why Winamp is crashing, but it plays the games just fine. The finished product will look exactly the same, but it won't have the white outline on the bezel.

I designed the marquee and bezel in Photoshop. The marqee was ordered online, while the bezel was just printed and laminated at an office supply store. I made the stylized Dalek in Photoshop, put a grid over it, and used that as a guide for masking off the full-sized one. Did the whole Dalek with masking tape and a spray gun. The other side has a Doctor Who diamond logo that I did with cardboard stencils and an airbrush.



By the way, the coin door is a real one I repaired and refinished. It's lit by a pair of red LED taillights that run off the computer power supply. It's fully functional. Quarters will register credits.

[Ash]

Wow!
That looks pretty sweet.

How many games have you got on it?
Just one?  Or does it have several to choose from?

How many hours would you say you've put into it?

[dean]

Gushhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[AndyC]

I can't say for sure how much time went into it. It's been an off-and-on project for about three years. The panel and computer were completed over two years ago. I finally got around to the cabinet last spring. I took a week's vacation in March and used a good deal of it to build the cabinet. Priming and painting with a spraygun didn't take long at all. The masking and design painting took about a month of working an hour here and there, and installing the guts was about the same.

The hardest part was moving the painted shell from the garage to the house. It has about three sheets of 3/4" MDF in it, at just under 100 pounds per sheet.

The final assembly took a while because there were cooling fans and lights to wire, and acrylic to cut. The marquee retainers and speaker grilles needed to be painted. The sound system also required hacking a couple of sets of cheap computer speakers for the amps, and building a subwoofer enclosure out of the leftover MDF.

Now comes the hard part - getting around to the last couple of jobs that will finally finish it off.

I will definitely need to get the back panel on, since my daughter likes to hide inside and fiddle with the sound controls 

[Andrew]

That is an amazing bit of work and I love the cabinet.  Using a Dalek as the side art is genius.  I'd like to see a picture of the other side if you ever get a chance.

[Mr. DS]

That is a thing of beauty if I may say so 

[Ash]

I'm totally in the dark here and feel weird asking this but...

What's a Dalek?   

[Mr_Vindictive]

Andy = My Hero

This cabinet is great Andy.  I love the Dalek on the side and the professional look of it all.  I've seen numerous homemade cabinets over the years and yours is one of the best.  I've always wanted to buy an old tabletop cabinet and have MAME running on a Shuttle PC within it.  That would make for an interesting coffee table, yet I do not have the time nor the skill to do such a thing. 

Karma to you Andy! 



Ash,

EXTERMINATE!  The Daleks are the infamous bad guys on the long running Dr. Who TV show. 

[IzzyDedjet]

Nice.
Andy, if you ever decide that you want to build those for a living...or even as a side project, just give me a holler.  I'm a carpenter by trade and can probably come up with some ways to do this either faster or easier....Or neither, but have a lot of fun doing it.

Karma to you bub.

[Zapranoth]

What's it running, Andy?

Windows, running MAME?

[Torgo]

That's too cool. How many games do you have running on this machine?

[AndyC]

It's running Windows XP and MAME, with Mamewah as a front end. It has pretty much any game you can name on it. I got several DVDs full from a guy who distributes them for the cost of disks and shipping, as a way of preserving the games.

I'm trying to get Winamp to work on it, but it seems to be crashing after a few songs. The machine doubles as a jukebox. I'd love to get a more nostalgic-looking jukebox program, but none offer the functionality or versatility of Winamp. So, I trade a bit of style for that.

For the most part, you never see windows. I replaced the boot screen with a green vector-looking image that says 'Shall we play a game?' The startup and shutdown sounds have been replaced by WAV files of Daleks shouting appropriate things. There's just something fun about making a home PC look like something it's not.

[Ash]

If you've got a video camera, you should shoot a short vid of you playing the machine and post it on Youtube for all of us to see.
(Andrew added a Youtube link function to the board if you didn't already know)

I'd love to see that thing in action.   

[trekgeezer]

Beyond cool Andy, have some karma!  

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I'm totally in the dark here and feel weird asking this but...

What's a Dalek?   

I'll chime in.  A Dalek was Dr. Who's most common enemy.   If you made a psychotic cyborg out of R2D2, then added a laser projector and plumber's helper.    I'm a big fan, except that I'm not sure why they didn't make one that could navigate stairs. 

-Ed