Build an arcade cabinet

There are a lot of designs for different cabinets out there with a lot of variation in width and height so I stacked a couple of old moving boxes and tried to find a height that worked for me. Still tweaking a little.

The software part is more or less ready, a basic linux box which boots a basic graphic desktop, logs itself in, and starts advmenu. Advmenu is a remarkably tweakable multi-emulator frontend, so far I’ve gotten it to organise and run MAME/arcade games, Super Nintendo (SNES), Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Nintendo 64, Atari 2600 and TI 99/4A games. It provides organised lists with configurable filters complete with screenshots, cabinet pictures, and various other information (if available of course).

Took about a weekend to build and tweak – I’m afraid the woodworking part is going to last much longer :/

I’ve also been reading up on light guns , as there are quite a few good shooting games out there. I’d need a CRT also, but I was planning on that anyway – TFT screens just don’t give you that ‘true’ arcade feeling.

I’ve wanted to do this for years, but never had the space. Now that I have a bigger house, maybe it would be fun to finally make one.

I’ll cheat a little on the controllers, I’ve bought the X-Arcade two player joystick some two or three years ago when I was planning for this. It is an extremely solid set of two arcade joysticks with 8 buttons each (glee!), programmable, and built like a tank.

As backend I’ll probably use linux+MAME, although the Xmame site has been curiously dead for a while now. I might even look into AdvanceMAME and hook the PC up to an old TV or monitor to get that real arcade feeling you just don’t get from LCD monitors.

Yes, with winter coming, it might be a good time to build an arcade cabinet :)

First up: measurements.