The first thing I needed was blueprints. After searching the internet I came across Koenigs site which was a massive help. I decided to base my design on his Project Mame cab, as he kindly includes his blueprints and layouts to work from.
After buying the MDF Board 18x607x2440mm (3 boards £13.60 ea). I marked the outline on one of the boards and clamped it to another so both sides of the cabinet could be cut at once, not just to save time but to make sure each side matched as I'd be cutting it freehand.
I cut the clamped boards with my router and circular saw (for the long straights). Then using the router I went around all the edges using a rounding bit to give them a smooth edge. I then flipped the MDF over and did this on the other side and then used some light sand paper to bring it all in together. After this I cut sections of Pine Stripwood 21x25mmx2.4m (3 strips £4.29 ea) and using a glue gun, placed them in position before screwing them down. These strips provide the ledges for the front, back, top and bottom panels along with control panel. It's worth noting I had to chip these off and redo them about 3 times during the build in order to get the angles right once the panels were on, so it's best not to get too carried away with the gluing. The panels for the top, bottom, front etc are cut from the remaining 18mm MDF board (where extra sturdiness was required), a sheet of MDF Board 12x1220x2440mm (£13.83) to reduce the weight where possible (instead of using 18mm throughout) and also a sheet of 3x606x1220mm MDF Board for the back of the cabinet.
As you'll notice, the 3mm board isn't long enough. I should have got a 2400mm length but purchased a 1220mm length. That's the joys of looking after a 1yr old while ordering your materials. However, it's going at the back of the cabinet and I had enough 6mm left over in the shed from another DIY project to cover the rest of the back. It won't be seen so I bodged it (this will be a recurring theme). After cutting out all the panels and attaching them to the sides, it was time to give it a lick of white undercoat (with primer). This really helped as the following coat of black went on perfectly. After leaving it 24 hrs to dry I applied the first of two black gloss coats, lightly sanding between each one and being careful not to get black gloss on the new kitchen floor.
For the monitor, I just used a standard LED PC monitor. I didn't want to get caught up trying to get a heavy CRT in there or original arcade screen. Using the mame emulator and some scanline filters you can still get it looking great, so I opted for a Viseo243Ddb 24" LED DVI VGA Monitor (£82.49) from ebuyer. It's quite thin but has a long bulky stretch across the middle of the rear, so I adjusted the monitor rest panels to allow for this and to let the monitor sit as far back in the cab as possible. I also fitted two car stereo speakers: EDGE ED204 4" 10cm 4-way Car Speakers Pair 120W (£15.99) that I purchased from ebay. I used the router to cut out the holes for these. The speakers are wired to a small amp (quite weak, but plenty loud enough for the cabinet and my house). The amp was another ebay purchase and is a cheap Chinese 'boat or car' amp, but was only £14.99 and compact enough for what I needed.
I kept the monitor in place with some corner brackets and quickly realised that I had to cut extra sections out of the panel rests on so it could be plugged in. This (along with some of my shoddy workmanship) caused a few extra problems and I needed to pad out some of the corners to make sure the monitor was secure and level. However, this will all be hidden behind the bezel which I made from an Acrylic Sheet 60cmx1.22m (£18.39). Ideally, it could have been thicker as the 2mm didn't leave much room for error (which you'll see later) and left it quite difficult to cut cleanly. I measured the viewable area of the monitor and took a few mm off so that the plastic of the monitor could not be seen under the bezel. I took a sheet of sticky back plastic and cut this the monitor measurements I took (rounding off the edges) and stuck this to the acrylic sheet. Then it was out into the garden to spray the acrylic with some black matt spray paint. After offering it up to the cabinet, I realised I needed a few extra bits for the bezel to rest on (rather than just on the monitor), so it didn't dip or move about. I fitted some extra pieces of the stripwood for this, they'll also double as the strips I'll fasten the bezel onto the cabinet with.
It fits and looks good! Inside I have a Zoostorm AMD Dual Core A4-5300, 4GB DDR3 RAM, AMD HD 7480D from Ebuyer (£141.65) with a bog standard mouse and keyboard attached (totalling about £5.00). No graphics card needed as the motherboard has a semi decent onboard chip and it's only running the mame emulator which doesn't need much graphics power to handle what I want to play at the moment. I'll likely add a graphics card later when money allows as it'd be nice to play some pinball and more recent games on there. But for now, I whip the bezel, monitor and PC back out and get started on the artwork. I'm a Marvel fan so bought four posters (£3.99 each) and wallpaper pasted them to the sides of the cabinet. Even though I've done tons of wallpapering I didn't account for how much the posters would wrinkle and shrink (as opposed to wallpaper). So the finished product wasn't quite what I intended. Thankfully the creases made it look nice and vintage, but the lines I'd cut were far from perfect and needed a little touch up with some black paint once everything was dry. Up to scrutiny it looks a bit ropey in parts, but at normal glance looks fine. Each side took one and a half posters to cover the area I needed, I used the last poster on what will be the front door of the cabinet (I also got a bit soppy and wrote my son's, my wife's and my name on the area under the monitor and bezel, forgetting I'd been taking photos that I might use on a blog).
Now for the really fun stuff. The arcade parts arrived!
I got the following from Arcade World UK:
- 2 x Long Shaft Ball Top Arcade Joystick
- 6 x Happ Ultimate Arcade Button
- 9 x Happ Ultimate Arcade Button
- 1 x Happ Ultimate Arcade Button
- 2 x Sanwa LB 35 Clear Ball Top Handle
- 1 x Classic Arcade Start Button
- 1 x Classic Arcade Start Button
- 1 x I PAC 2 And Wiring Kit
Coming in at a grand total of £120.70 inc VAT and shipping. It was time to make the control panel! What I hadn't accounted for is how the joysticks fit together. I'm not totally sure what I expected, but it ended up much more complicated. Thankfully, there's a lot of info out there and I found this article especially helpful. So I needed two sheets of MDF and a sheet of acrylic. One sheet to mount the joystick on and one to cover it over (and for the sticker artwork to go on) and to support the acrylic sheet. These were easy enough to do with the router (to remove a thin layer of rectangle for the joystick mounting plate) and a 28mm wood boring drill bit (and very carefully measured out holes using the same template as for the control panel sticker). The biggest problem of the build came from the 2mm acrylic which was not a friend of the wood boring drill bit. I had the idea to clamp the acrylic between the two sheets of MDF so it would be secure, but the acrylic still cracked and splintered.
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In the end I had to buy another sheet of acrylic, clamp it between the MDF sheets again and risk routing the holes using the MDF as a guide. Thankfully it worked and everything fitted.
During this time I also received the stickers for the control panel, speaker area and marquee. Unfortunately, going back to my confusion with the joystick, this had a knock on effect to my control panel sticker. It was designed to go over the control panel and the front lip of the cabinet, but the way I was going to put the control panel together meant the sticker would have to be cut. I didn't do a very good job of it. Gutted. Especially as the stickers (in total) set me back £38.06 (from Diginate). It doesn't look terrible, but doesn't look great either.
For the marquee, I fitted a cheap £10.00 strip light from screwfix. Took two lengths of acrylic and sandwiched my marquee sticker between them. I used the image for the Marvel Vs Capcom cabinet to keep the Marvel Theme and also because my imagination is shot. For the control panel sticker I used a Japanese Iron Man poster design as I liked the colour scheme and kept that scheme for the speaker sticker, which in hindsight looks like a big pair of googly eyes.
Then it was time to put it all together!
The bezel and control panel were fixed down with mirror screws. I also added side buttons for pinball games. All that was left to do now was wire the underside of the buttons to the ipac keyboard encoder (purchased with the arcade buttons) - this plugs into the pc via USB. No fancy soldering or wiring needed. All the buttons are wired using push on crimp connectors that came ready put together, then attached to the ipac by inserting the wire and screwing down the clamp (like wiring a big plug). The amp for the car speakers was fitted so the knob is accessible (!) on the underside (!!) of the control panel. The PC was stored inside and the front panel fixed in place.
At this point the machine was finished and moved to the lounge, then quickly banished to the cupboard under the stairs the next morning :(
I was so excited to have the thing up and running that I forgot to take picture of the finished article before it went under the stairs! Bearing in mind I had to take the door frame off and remove some plasterboard in order to get it in there, I'm not to keen to get it back out until we move house! With that in mind, here are the best pictures I could manage in a very confined space (with terrible wallpaper and plaster showing)...
One last thing, for years it's been a nightmare to get the roms for mame. However, now they're (kind of) legally available as part of a digital archiving project in the USA. The archive site can be found here
