Building an Arcade Cabinet (Updated: 01/19/14)

Hello everyone,

Building an arcade cabinet has been something I have been interested in doing for a long time, and finally it is time to start. For the cabinet I am planning on running a series of emulators as well as Steam. The emulators will all be made for arcade emulating and maybe some older console stuff (NES, SNES, Genesis etc.) and Steam will be running for arcade style game that are available on Steam (Rogue Legacy, Nighogg etc.) Over the next few weeks (maybe months) I will be writing about what I am doing, how things are going, things I would recommened and not reccommend doing as well and answering your questions about my build in this thread. I am by no means an expert at building cabinets but I will learn along the way and hopefully help, and convince, interested watchers to try it for themselves.

Thanks for checking in.

If anyone is interested in helping with artwork the thread can be found here.

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Update (01/19/14)

Finally! After waiting for a while my test controls, (Ordered from Ultimarc ) have made it to my house and I can start testing. First thing I had to do is collect everything I needed to build my test controls (Image 1). I measured out where I wanted things to go as far as a control layout (I'll get in to more detailed building techniques when I build the real board) mounted the buttons and joystick and set off to wiring (Image 2). The wiring I did rather quickly and sloppy, but when the final product is done I will make things a bit tidier. (Image 3, 4, 5) After a bit of control mapping using the iPAC software I was ready for testing. This step of testing was mainly for two reasons.

1. Can I get the buttons and joystick to work the way I want them to... (Yes, might take a bit more playing but I am happy so far)
2. Do I like the location of the buttons and joystick relative to one another.. (NOPE!!!, but this is why I did the testing.)

Game One was some Rogue Legacy. It played great, would have to do some better button mapping on the final board to make sure that I have all of the controls I need to play the game properly. but for an initial test it was a lot of fun to play. I showed the controls a bit at the start of the video to show that the jump heights can vary based on how you press the button.

Game Two was PAC-MAN CE DX+. Easy game to play as It is mostly joystick, with one button mapped for the bombs. Easy simple, going to be a ton of fun on the finished cabinet.

Game Three was NBA Jam (Arcade Version) running on the MAME emulator. After getting the buttons mapped properly it ran great. One of my favourite arcade games ever. My poor wife is going to go crazy once the cabinet is done because this might be all that she hears. PIPPEN!!!

The testing went far better than I expected and now knowing how well the controls work I can set off building the actual cabinet. Update coming in the near future.

Nice update! I have a suggestion: upgrade to 6 buttons!

If you decide to go down the MAME route, you'll have access to some of the best fighting games in history. Street Fighter 2/3/4/alpha/etc require 6 buttons, but are a blast to play on arcade controls.

Great start so far, good luck with the rest of the project!

Wahoooooo! now this is a project I can get behind.

So I was walking down an arcade yesterday, and those LCD flatscreen monitors on older Pacman games looked BIZARRE to me.

Looks good, and also going with modern steam games sounds exciting. Mame cabinets sometimes grow dull fast.

@monkeyto: Hey Monkeyto, the plan is to go with a six button layout like the one pictured below, I just used four for testing.

@crithon: I agree that playing alone on a MAME cabinet can be boring alone, which is why I wanted to have the Steam aspect in the cabinet, but with a group of friends the old school stuff will be awesome.

dude, that looks like a good layout for a controller. Yeah my cousin was trying to make controllers out of cigar boxes as an experiment. By the way, this is super neat little design for using alligator clips for controllers onto anything.

Can't wait to see how you grow along with this.

Got a mention on this weeks Community Spotlight

Thanks ZombiePie,

If it ever stops snowing I will be able to continue with assembly.

Hey Duder, any movement on this? I am looking to build my own steam arcade cabinet as well but I want a 4 player cabinet for all of the cool local multiplayer stuff happening now.

@yothatlimp: Yeah I am making some progress, nothing noteworthy. I have teamed up With Sam who did the Nighthawks arts and hopefully going to have a picture of it up soon. As for actual cabinetry, I need all of the snow and ice to melt in front of my garage so that I can get the car that it stuck in it out. Then things will start rolling a bit faster.