I guess this technically belongs in the Arts Board.
For years now I've wanted my own arcade cabinet. It's been a small dream of mine since I was a kid, I almost bought one a few times when I'd seen someone selling one in the wild, but I wouldn't have been happy with it I'm sure, so I decided to make it a reality by making my own! I've been working on getting it done for years now, since 2012, with plenty of setbacks and lost motivation along the way.
An ex Golden Tee cabinet and this thing was a massive piece of garbage. I had planned to gut the thing, turn it into something new, and that would've been great but it was just too darn huge. Would've made for a neat 4 player cabinet, but I worked on and off with it for a year before deciding it needed too much work and I just didn't have the space for such a large cabinet. Not to mention it was an absolute pain in the ass to move around, so in the end I sold it onward to someone else and opted for a flat-pack option instead.
Bunches of wood. Meanwhile, I redesigned graphics I already had leftover from the Golden Tee cabinet to fit this new design. I spent a lot of time mulling over colours and patterns and positions of buttons etc. I'd always planned on making the design orange or at least something bright, mainly because when most people design an arcade cabinet they go for black and blue or edgy colours like that, and I wanted mine to be more of a retro design with bold colours that'd stand out. The final design would end up looking something like this:
Onto the printing phase and I had a lot of trouble getting the printing right. I hired a guy to print them for me but ended up suppling the wrong dimensions and other dramas like that, so it cost me a lot more than I'd anticipated and took a lot of time to finally get it organised. Meanwhile I had to have the Control Panel re-cut because the guy had cut it to the wrong dimensions as well. After that was all done my designs were applied and ready to go.
After that was all done, I basically spent the last few months gathering the emulators and games I'd want, redoing all the interfaces to make them look pretty and getting that all set up. Took WAY longer than I anticipated, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
Last couple of days I've spent wiring the control panel and it's an absolute mess back there, but so far things are looking good. Despite the fact that one button doesn't work for some reason, I managed to get everything else working and even had a quick match of Street Fighter with my wife. So far so good!
Once I get the thing up and running, I have to assemble the whole deal, this includes mounting the monitor which is a large 21.3" 4:3 monitor and should look lovely in the cabinet seeing as it's one of the largest non-widescreen monitors I could find. I actually had to buy two of the things because the first one I bought was damaged beyond repair and I had to end up hunting down a refund for the thing. Never buy electronics on eBay folks! As it turns out, I also need to source a new PC because the one I'd planned to use wouldn't turn on at all when I went to test my newly wired control panel yesterday. Damn.
At this stage I don't know how complete the build is, but I'd say maybe 33%? I'm hoping to have it done by Christmas so people can play it when they come around, but we'll see... to be continued!
