DIY arcade/stereo maybe?

[bprewit]

I have a old space zap cabinet that I converted to a cheesy little MAME arcade but using a 300mhz processor with a 8meg video card and 32meg of ram. I decided to upgrade it a bit and give me a place to put a old stereo I have that was gathering dust so jigsaw and screwdrivers flying I took the whole thing apart and cut it out for the stereo. The control area was too small for a two player setup so I had to cut a board that would allow me to mount two sticks and 12 buttons. I still need lots of work, install the controls, upgrade the little pc, and give the whole thing a paint job. I built a interface for the controls using a old keyboard interface and mapped the wiring. It was a pain but it works. Also gave enough room to mount a keyboard and trackball mouse so will get this hooked up to the network as well and have some web surfing funtion, games, and tunes all in the same little cabinet. Started messing with it tonight and ordered all my stuff so it dosent look like much but hopefully it will soon!

[cbianco]

Looks like fun! Make sure to show us the final product once you are done.

Christopher

[Reefaholic1980]

Thats really cool! I have some emulators for like a bunch of classic games from NES, Snes, Sega genisis, and other systems. I will look for them if you want them. All you would have to do is set up a main selection menu and you have a awsome little arcade.

[witecap4u]

My buddy setup a mame machine a couple years ago, but ended up making the whole cabinet himself. He's got all of the MAME roms created before they shut down the download section of the site. I think there are like 7 cd-r's full of roms. BTW, what are you using for a monitor?

cs

[bprewit]

Someday I will build a nice cabinet for a mame machine but for now this little cabinet works perfectly. I finally finished it up and the total cost was just under $100 thanks to lots of old computer parts from upgrades over the years and of course ebay for easily found parts I didnt have. I am using a 17" pc monitor that I pulled out of the plastic housing and mounted to a metal frame I built and installed it into the cabinet. The marque and a couple of other parts are still the original space zap for now but will change them eventually. I hacked a old keyboard to tie the controls in and it was time consuming as well as confusing soldering and labeling 42 seperate wires for all the buttons! I installed a copy of JukeWin as well so not only lots of games installed it also works as a jukebox of sorts with the JukeWin interface and looks pretty cool. So total there are 13 buttons, 2 joysticks, a old trackball to select games, internet access using a USB keyboard, and tons of MP3's with a old Technics stereo and some Sony speakers for listening to tunes. I need to take some better pictures but havent been able to get close to it since I finished it as nephews and everyone else is swarming around. Its ok because they all have to sleep sometime and then I can play! Oh and I am running Mame32 which is a pretty cool 32bit windows run version of mame and makes it easy to scroll through and select the different games. I think I have around 50 games so far that all run just fine on the old 900mhz processor but hopefully will have more eventually.