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Building your own Arcade Cabinet. A labor of love.

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TONX

TONX

Distinguished Air Superiority
SO some history:

In 2012 I had a new years resolution to build my own multicade arcade cabinet, called the Tonxcade for obvious reasons. I ended up building it in about 2 months and finished it by the end of March. It wasn't ideal because i used a cabinet frame from recroommasters.com instead of building my own cabinet, but it turned out pretty cool.

I used an X-arcade Tankstick and had fellow gaffer Dreweyes design the art for it instead of the lame art it comes with. I also added a few graphics to the side and marquee to make it look cool. Used a front end program called Maximus Arcade for all the emulators and made a custom UI theme.

Here's a video and photos of it in action:

Video: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150553687872293&l=6766670347359596812

lrUYdJC.jpg

hAm7sVH.jpg

Side Graphics
4iFC5Eq.jpg

the Marquee
Click to expand...
Pardon my instagram pictures and nasally voice, i usually decide to make a video when I'm sick for whatever reason. Eventually it cost me around $1100 to make it total. Better than expected.

Last year i made another resolution to do the same thing, but this time with an NES.
I called it the HyperNES.

I took a broken NES i had in the garage, gutted it, and stuck in a motherboard small enough to fit inside it. It obviously wasnt as powerful as the Tonxcade, but it ran anything up to a N64 level graphics pretty well in 1080p. I used wireless Xbox 360 controllers instead of wired. I'm thinking of switching to XBO controllers cause of the better d-pad.

Here is a video and photos of the HyperNES:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh-IRDdpJJI
Startup/Shutdown video.

ZMPSyVs.jpg

Building it

9zIyBvG.jpg

Splash Screen

z9jbGsh.jpg
Click to expand...
Fast forward to today. This years project for me is to build a cocktail arcade cabinet. Tonxcade 2.0, which is probably my most anticipated project yet.
I'm really into fighting games and i wanted to make something that my friends can come by and drink and not worry about ruining it. This one is gonna have a dual monitor setup and use Sanwa joystick and buttons instead of Happ. I just bought most of my parts today and i will be building it within the next few weeks.

Has anyone else on GAF built their own cabinets? I'm interested in tips and how-to's. I know this is a long post but im really into this kind of stuff!
 
A

ant_

not characteristic of ants at all
This is a personal goal of mine once I get some more space and a place to put it. Can you give an idea of the parts one would need to start?
 
B

brotherbean

Member
I have wanted to build an arcade for years. With a background in woodworking and a penchant for playing games, it seems like a book that practically writes itself.


That being said, I know myself, better than almost anyone. I'll have a blast building the cabinet, browsing foreign-language websites for the best electronics I can afford and scouring every dark corner of the web for the most obscure, interesting marquee out there. I'll get it put together and I'll stand back to marvel in the glory of what I've made and then...I'll go upstairs and forget all about it.


I think a MAME cabinet would be bonkers if I was single and had roomates...I'm picturing drunken NBA Jam tournaments, arguments settled over matches of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 2, finally finishing the X-Men arcade game. But the reality is I'm pretty sure I'd get bored with it very quickly, enough so that I should probably just stick to playing MAME on the pc without all the spectacle of building a cabinet to go with it.


Edit: What sort of display are you using? I happen to have a discarded 22" LCD and an old XP tower sitting around that would be perfect for...gah, not again.
 
TONX

TONX

Distinguished Air Superiority
K2Valor said:
This is a personal goal of mine once I get some more space and a place to put it. Can you give an idea of the parts one would need to start?
Click to expand...

Know your budget.
It's not cheap to do this but it really is rewarding when you have it up and running.

Read up on everything. Twice.
I spent more time doing my homework on how to get it up and running than actually hands on building the thing.

Make sure you want to do this.
Explanation below
brotherbean said:
I have wanted to build an arcade for years. With a background in woodworking and a penchant for playing games, it seems like a book that practically writes itself.


That being said, I know myself, better than almost anyone. I'll have a blast building the cabinet, browsing foreign-language websites for the best electronics I can afford and scouring every dark corner of the web for the most obscure, interesting marquee out there. I'll get it put together and I'll stand back to marvel in the glory of what I've made and then...I'll go upstairs and forget all about it.


I think a MAME cabinet would be bonkers if I was single and had roomates...I'm picturing drunken NBA Jam tournaments, arguments settled over matches of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 2, finally finishing the X-Men arcade game. But the reality is I'm pretty sure I'd get bored with it very quickly, enough so that I should probably just stick to playing MAME on the pc without all the spectacle of building a cabinet to go with it.
Click to expand...
I can totally empathize with you. I was the same way when i built it. I had about 3 straight weeks of fun time with it, then there was about a month when i didnt even turn it on (Dark Souls, i blame thee).

There's nothing like it though. If you grew up with arcades like i did and dropped endless quarters on SF2 and Sega AM2 games, then its absolutely better than playing it on your PC emulated. It's just a matter of preference.
 
T

TheFightingFish

Member
On gaming side we have a fairly active arcade stick thread that also has some knowledge about building arcade cabinets.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=483428

They are actually really fun projects. I've done one custom stick, and now my current build is putting a hidden two player control panel into a classy looking end table. I've got a small condo, so the size of an arcade cabinet is right out for me, plus I like the flexibility of keeping my controls separate from the game systems.

It honestly got me back into gaming when I was kinda moving away from it. I just picked it up as a DIY project that sounded like fun as I like woodworking and basic wiring. I didn't even really play fighting games or arcade games or anything like that. But as silly as it sounds some types of games are just way more fun when you play them with a stick. Got me into Street Fighter and Cave SHMUPs.
 
F

Funky Papa

FUNK-Y-PPA-4
Subbing to this thread.

I've been thinking about gutting a Naomi arcade and turning it into a MAME machine (I always keep my old computers, so I have all the spares barring the cabinet itself), but units in good condition are scarce and expensive, not to mention that getting quality CRT monitors is getting way difficult and costly these days.

What are some good Xtension-like kits that don't cost an arm?
 
F

FSLink

Banned
Can't build one at the moment due to time/moving around a lot, but I really want to do this eventually.

Definitely going to use Sanwa buttons/sticks, make it a Japanese style sit-down cab, and have Hyperspin as the interface:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEgaqXsavYA

And then maybe sometime later do one for SHMUPs with like Seimitsu parts or something.
 
T

Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!

Member
I built one, used it for about 6 months, and then couldn't help myself when a Sega Astro City came up and bought that one too. There wasn't room for both so I sold the one I built. It was cool, but not Astro City cool.

It ended up being way more expensive then I thought though because the project evolved from a mame machine with a CRT and/or LCD tv to a mame machine with a real arcade monitor to a full fledged arcade machine that ran PCBs. It was a fun experience. I'll probably build another one to go alongside the Astro when I get more room.
 
F

firebricks3

Member
I've built/put together 2 mamecabs before. One was out of a really old lifeforce cabinet and the other was out of an ultracade. The lifeforce one required a lot of work and I ended up building my own control panel to replace the old broken one. They are super hard to move, so I would recommend not building one if you are about to, otherwise they are great to have at parties. Everyone seems to have their favorite classic arcade game so it's always a hit.
 
Squirrel Killer

Squirrel Killer

Member
I've thought about building one, and I have the parts to build the stick portion, but I've always felt the aesthetics of most cabinets I've seen are crap. I don't want a poorly built black monolith or "dragon porn" (my wife's term) fanart temple. I've got a friend who's a master carpenter, however, and when I win the lottery, he'll be one of the first 10-15 calls I make in order to have him build me a swank mission style or IKEA style cab
which will sit as an empty shell for two years.
 
O

OJdaKiller

Member
The reality of cabs is that if you're building it's a Kraylix or GTFO.

Otherwise, something nice is going to cost you money, unless you A: live on the West Coast and B: have some electrical fix-it know-how.

Mame setups in arcade cabs is totally fine, but pieced together junk with monitor swaps for LCD screens typically end up looking like a Frankencab that while they get the job done, don't necessarily look visually appealing.

Unfortunately, if you want something nice it's going to cost you money. Thegameroom in UT is a great resource and Ken is a good guy to talk to.
 
A

acrid

Banned
Really awesome Tonx! Looks great! This is on my "to do" list, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I hope to one of these days. Anyway, great job!
 
B

BubbaMc

Member
Funky Papa said:
Subbing to this thread.

I've been thinking about gutting a Naomi arcade and turning it into a MAME machine (I always keep my old computers, so I have all the spares barring the cabinet itself), but units in good condition are scarce and expensive, not to mention that getting quality CRT monitors is getting way difficult and costly these days.

What are some good Xtension-like kits that don't cost an arm?
Click to expand...

Any CRT TV will do in a pinch, there are chassis available to convert these to arcade monitors, with spectacular results.
 
TONX

TONX

Distinguished Air Superiority
BubbaMc said:
Nice, but why on earth are you using an LCD? That's sacrelige, man!
Click to expand...

Well for the first arcade i used a kit that would only really take a 22" flat screen LCD. That's what it was designed for and there wasn't much room for anything else. I did use filters at first that added scanlines and things like that, but in the end, i opted for the hi res. I did look for the highest response time i could find though. Like i said earlier, it's a matter of preference.. ;P
 
T

T-Matt

Member
Congrats on completing you planned on and wished for. I plan on doing the same later this year except in the form of a bartop arcade or possibly a cocktail.
 
T

thefit

Member
If you want to skip a couple of steps look into buying a used cab shell off places like craigslist you can then sand it down or repaint/decal to your liking and insert whatever setup your going for. If your lucky try finding one with a working monitor and Jamma harness they make adapters for jamma to usb for the controls and vga to RGB for the monitor. I own a neogeo cab and initially I was going pullout the RGB monitor and swap it with an LED but after I got it running with the MVS and seeing those nostalgic retro graphics the way they were meant to be I left it as is.
 
S

shuri

Banned
If you are going to create your own cabinet, I suggest you copy plans used by real arcade cabinets; those cabs were well made, and well designed. Creating your own cabinet will always end up costing you more, and you'll always find flaws in your design and its gonna take more time, patience and money to fix them.

Avoid going for an all in one cabinet with support for every damn control scheme, its going to end up looking like shit or like the control panel of the Death Star. Go for the classic 8 directions, 6 buttons scheme.

You can buy joysticks that can be switch from 8 to 4 directions on the fly; and I know that there are more advanced sticks out there that are compatible with some front-ends so that when the front-end detects that the joystick is that model and that the game selected is a 4 direction game, it will disable the diagonals. I have no idea if it works very well.

If you can afford the time; make your controls and connection as modular as possible, so you can easily swap out pars or even the main computer without having to screw around and fix stuff once again to get it right.

It's 2014 and arcade CRTs are getting impossible to find for a decent price, and when you do, the quality is garbage. If you are going the emulator route, just use filters but dont over do them.

Plan out (AND TEST) your installation WAY in advance and don't start improvising when you are installing your setup inside the cabinet; if you run into issues, fixing them from the inside its going to be hell.

Also, when buying your monitor, always buy a spare one, just in case. one of my cabinets is a mame cabinet, and the monitor inside is a 17 inches 16:9. At the time, it was a nice monitor, and 17 inches were super common, but in 2014, finding NEW fresh 17 inches can be troublesome.
 
R

RedNumberFive

Banned
Bookmarked. This will be my summer project. I've already built a few custom sticks and have some experience wiring cabs.

Edit: TONX, do you have measurements/plans that you can link to?
 
C

captmcblack

Member
I still have my Marvel vs Capcom cabinet...sometimes I still feel like I want to gut it and make it into a MAME cabinet, but I understand that doing so to a functional cabinet is heresy, lol.
 
J

Jeff-DSA

Member
Here's a few pics of what I built. I built this a few years back, and I'm thinking of doing a new one to slim it down a bit. It's in a a gutted NFL Blitz cabinet.

tSHVYGH.jpg


Back then they didn't have so many out of the box products to work with, so I actually took LEDs, soldered resistors to them, daisy chained them, drilled each arcade button and slipped the head of the LED in and glued them in place, and wired it all to a PC power supply. It was a pain, but it looked awesome, so I put up with the time commitment.

As far as controls go, it has two optical joysticks, a 6 button and Neo Geo layout, a 4-way stick for classics, a spinner, and a rollerball. Despite all of the controls, it all fits well.

Edit: A really crappy pic of my wife playing.

ymCuyrS.jpg


And an even crappier pic showing it in the light.

iPBmMSp.jpg


This was right before moving, so the room was a mess and it was tucked away.
 
T

Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!

Member
RE: CRT vs LCD. No offense to team LCD but arcade games look so much better running on an actual arcade monitor (older ones, that is). If you're going to undertake a project as big as building an arcade cabinet, you should probably spring the extra cash to make sure it's authentic. You can find them for fairly cheap if you look long enough on neo-geo.com or KLOV.

I'm pretty sure a CRT arcade monitor is going to last you a long time too. They're made to be turned on for long periods of time, one sitting in your house that you turn on once every couple of days will probably take a long time to crap out (unless it's defective of course).
 
J

Jeff-DSA

Member
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku! said:
RE: CRT vs LCD. No offense to team LCD but arcade games look so much better running on an actual arcade monitor (older ones, that is). If you're going to undertake a project as big as building an arcade cabinet, you should probably spring the extra cash to make sure it's authentic. You can find them for fairly cheap if you look long enough on neo-geo.com or KLOV.

I'm pretty sure a CRT arcade monitor is going to last you a long time too. They're made to be turned on for long periods of time, one sitting in your house that you turn on once every couple of days will probably take a long time to crap out (unless it's defective of course).
Click to expand...

I've got a CRT in mine. Those beautiful scan lines...
 
M

mt1200

Member
Don't you get input lags in arcade machines which consist of a PC inside the arcade cabinet running mame emulators?.
 
A

Askani

Member
I started posting on a crappy forum with a dick admin like 12 years ago. A couple members from there I've seen here from time to time.

Anyway, one of the sub forums was home arcade cabs. It was my dream before and being able to talk about it there fueled my fire for awhile. It's been a dream for a long time. I *will* have one some day. And a nice SuperGun.
 
Allforce

Allforce

Member
I'd like to know where you found the plans, and if possible, share them with us. Also material costs, labor involved, etc.

I really like the idea of a "slim" cabinet like you've built with the LCD in it, and would love actual plans to build one since I have just about everything else available. I don't need a big 3 foot deep cabinet taking up more space then necessary.

Edit: Well I must have glossed over the link to recroommasters right there in your glorious first post. That is EXACTLY what I'm looking for, and the prices seem fair.
 
F

FinKL

Member
This is also a dream of mine to do, just been lazy of late. Congrats and look forward to anything else you present!
 
J

Jeff-DSA

Member
mt1200 said:
Don't you get input lags in arcade machines which consist of a PC inside the arcade cabinet running mame emulators?.
Click to expand...

I don't have any noticeable lag when I play, and I play a lot of twitch shooter games like Robotron 2084 and a bunch of shmups.

As for CRTs, you can gut a TV for the tube and pair it with a monitor chassis. Barring that, certain video cards will have DVI out and there are quite a few DVI to component converters that will work plug and play fashion with your TV set and it looks almost exactly like an old arcade monitor.
 
Ecto311

Ecto311

Member
Thanks for making the thread. A DIY arcade thread is the reason I joined gaf way back when. Reminds me I got some sanwa buttons for my daughters cab that I am looking to build. With tax time coming maybe I will get a plank of wood and finish it with her this summer.

Anyone run a raspberry pi vs an old computer inside one of these for emulation? I did read that it was a good enough computer for most things.
 
TONX

TONX

Distinguished Air Superiority
jziHG55.jpg


Day 1 of building it. Again i used recroommasters for the cab itself because it was the best priced, and im able to add mods to it. I'm going to add a dual monitor setup and use a hinge system to open the top whenever i need to make additional mods. also i need to drill more button holes.
 
M

megashock5

Member
Anyone in central Ohio want to buy mine?

I got pretty far along, but I can't get my old computer to recognize the controls. It has a minipac interface, so I probably just did something wrong with the wiring and don't have enough know-how to figure out what the problem lies.

I've pretty much given at this point, but it's a decent place to pick up for someone who knows what they're doing.

cab_041405a.jpg
 
C

Chairhome

Member
Nice. I went the cheaper route: we have arcade auctions here in Orlando every few months. I bought an old 4 player X-men cab (and had it for a while, bought some PCBs and a Killer Instinct 2 machine, and a War: Final Assault machine till I sold them off) then turned it into a MAME cab later. The X-men cab cost me about $250 if I remember correctly, then I had an old computer I was able to hook up to a JPAC. Looks great. Its a little janky though, whenever I have multiple people playing it, sometimes a certain keyboard combination gets pressed (since the buttons correspond to keyboard keys) and it'll minimize the window or do other weird things.
 
S

shuri

Banned
Chairhome said:
Nice. I went the cheaper route: we have arcade auctions here in Orlando every few months. I bought an old 4 player X-men cab (and had it for a while, bought some PCBs and a Killer Instinct 2 machine, and a War: Final Assault machine till I sold them off) then turned it into a MAME cab later. The X-men cab cost me about $250 if I remember correctly, then I had an old computer I was able to hook up to a JPAC. Looks great. Its a little janky though, whenever I have multiple people playing it, sometimes a certain keyboard combination gets pressed (since the buttons correspond to keyboard keys) and it'll minimize the window or do other weird things.
Click to expand...

By default the first player inputs in mame are (or were?) set to alt, ctrl and spacebar for Fire1,fire2 and fir3, so when you are playing with friends, your Player2,3,4 controls are probably set to random letters on the keyboard; so when P1 and the others play all at once, it sends like ALT+whatever. There's an util where you can change on the jpac the keyboard assignement for each player, this way you can assign the fire buttons to other letters instead. Once you do that, it's written perm into the jpac's firmware, so you also end up fixing the issue for other emulators!

Tonx, great job with the hypernes
 
T

TheNamelessOne

Member
I am currently building my first MAME cabinet. Well, I got a cabinet for free so I'm only replacing the parts inside. It's a lot of stuff to do and I'm currently waiting for my buttons and joysticks to arrive.

I bought a Core i3 board on which I'm currently running Hyperspin and it seems to work out so far. It was a bit of a hassle though, since there is a bug in Hyperspin that can't play the videos for each game with the Intel HD4000 onboard graphics, so I had to convert them from .mp4 to .flv.

The next step is to build a bigger control panel that has more room for one joystick and eight buttons for each player.

I will post pictures when I got side art and everything in order.
 
C

Chairhome

Member
shuri said:
By default the first player inputs in mame are (or were?) set to alt, ctrl and spacebar for Fire1,fire2 and fir3, so when you are playing with friends, your Player2,3,4 controls are probably set to random letters on the keyboard; so when P1 and the others play all at once, it sends like ALT+whatever. There's an util where you can change on the jpac the keyboard assignement for each player, this way you can assign the fire buttons to other letters instead. Once you do that, it's written perm into the jpac's firmware, so you also end up fixing the issue for other emulators!

Tonx, great job with the hypernes
Click to expand...

Thanks, I knew about changing the inputs but it totally slipped my mind that taking ALT out of the inputs would fix it. I'll have to try that this weekend, thanks!
 
T

therealPeterman

Neo Member
If you're going with an LCD in your cab tinker with MAME's HLSL settings. You can get a pretty good results if you've got a strong enough pc.
 
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