Hey everyone!

Recently I’ve been interested in a fun little project. I always wanted to have my own arcade cabinet, to have something similar to the arcade experience. Sure, I could just download ROMs and use MAME playing with a keyboard, but that just doesn’t cut it. And an actual cabinet with a game in it is… usually pretty expensive and not THAT easy to find.

So I set my goal to have my own upright arcade cabinet. And I found that the best and most cost-effective way was to make one myself. That’s how my quest to make my own arcade cabinet started.

And as you can see this is the #1 of my Arcade Center “series”, so I’ll have much more to talk about. I’ll start with my cabinet that I’m building right now.

Read on, there’s a bunch of info after the jump.


The games
First things first. If you want an arcade cabinet, you need games… or a game. There’s multiple ways to go about it. You can buy an actual arcade board with one game, or go the emulator way like I did. Get a good emulator, MAME preferably (for me it was MAMEUI32), and a recent enough version for your arcade stick to work on it. There’s loads of ROMs, of course, and with the advent of torrents it’s easy to find packs with thousands of games without much trouble. For example, the torrent I got had an overwhelming 6000 ROMs. Some of them weren’t working, or just plain sucked, or were just different versions of the same game, so I cut down that number by a few hundreds.

Of course, if you’re going that route like I did you’ll need a proper program to choose which game you want to play without trouble, and that of course will require a good front-end. This gives you an easy to navigate menu listing all the games you have (and, depending on the one you chose, you have various listing options). The one I found, which I think does a great job, is MALA frontend. Simple to use and it has a bunch of configurations. One thing to check with frontends is obviously making sure it works with the emulator you’re using. I went through 2 other frontends before getting to this one.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about this. Just make sure the computer you’ll be using is strong enough, as some games, even some that seem to be not very demanding, will lag on the emulator if your computer sucks (like the one I’m using… it can barely play Donkey Kong, yet it plays just about anything else perfectly). And if it isn’t strong enough, computers that can run properly aren’t THAT expensive.

The controls
The one important part of making an arcade cabinet, is, of course, the controls. Again there’s a bunch of options here. Buying a pre-made arcade stick, like the X-Arcade and the HotRod, or to make your own controls. At their basics, arcade sticks are just keyboards. So it’s possible to just make your own arcade controls. There’s various ways of doing that, like connecting buttons and joysticks to certain keys on your keyboard. Of course the internet is a GREAT resource for that, I found a lot of different ways to do it when searching for the right solution.

I, again, went the simple way and got an X-Arcade Dual Joystick.

A logical choice. It’s highly resistant, it works for 2 people, it uses good quality components, it’s easy to open up and mod if need be, it’s customizable, and most of all the emulator I used had a configuration to get the stick working with the emulator with no trouble at all. The only thing to remember with this stick is that you must make sure to plug in the PS/2 cable and not the USB, and make sure the actual keyboard is plugged in and with num lock set ON. Only then will it actually work.

The cabinet
Ah yes, the cabinet. Also an important part to get the actual arcade experience. Like I’ve said before, there’s a ton of ways to go with that. My original idea was to use my craftsmanship skillz (lolwhat?), and by craftsmanship skillz I mean using my father’s help, to build my own arcade cabinet and shape it to my liking. There’s many plans and measurements and such to find on the internet, so you’re not left in the dark on that. And if I had indeed made my own cabinet, I already had a chosen design and all. But then I found something interesting. I randomly ran a search on craigslist and what do I find? An arcade cabinet for 100$, all made and it was really good. I asked for pictures and it was pretty nice so I went there and got it.

It’s an authentic Nintendo cabinet. Not in PERFECT shape, but not in incredibly bad shape either. When I went to pick it up, the screen, bezel, marquee, frontal plexiglass, game and controls were removed, but the rest was left untouched. So now I had the perfect starting point to actually put everything in there after getting a good screen, a computer, the arcade stick and testing various software. AND I saved a lot of time too.

Where am I now?
Here’s what it looks like right now (sorry for the horrible picture quality, I was using a crappy camera):

There were some slight modifications to do: repairing a defective button on the stick(instead of just replacing it for an unused button on the stick… damn we’re stupid >_>), putting in the screen at the right angle (it basically just fit by putting it there and nothing else, only little tweaks to get the exact right fit), plugging in the computer and everything that needed to be plugged into it (the back of the cabinet is a random mess of wires right now), cutting a very small part on each side of the cabinet to have easy access to the white “Add Credit” buttons on the sides of the stick and…. that’s about it. OH, and we modified the speaker upfront (that the people I bought this from left there) and made the sounds come from there (simple modification require a set of working speakers of course), which is pretty badass. The arcade stick is at a perfect height, the screen is at a great angle, and the computer isn’t THAT hard to reach.

What do I need to do now? Well, I have to get myself a marquee, since now there’s just plexiglass with the neon behind it (it has a kinda random flashing effect too which is kinda cool). The monitor is placed fine but we’ll need to add a bezel to hide everything that’s behind it and give a more authentic feel to it. I’ll also need to get a bit plexiglass to put in front of the screen. The current molding around the arcade is in bad shape so we’ll remove the current one and put some black molding instead. There’s some other finishing touches to do of course.

Current cost: Arcade stick is 130$+shipping (got mine as a Christmas present, so FREE), computer can cost around 100-200$ (I used my sister’s computer(not that she cares, she lives 2 hours away from me now), so  FREE), and the arcade cabinet’s cost differs depending on how you’re planning to do it (for me it was 100$ for the cabinet + time to put everything together). So for now this cabinet cost me a measly 100$, and the experience is great. There’s still lots of work to do, this is far from final, but I’m already quite satisfied.

So that’s it for my first Arcade Center post (damn I’m good at naming stuff……okay, not really >_>). I’ll have multiple other posts in this “series”, mostly talking about arcade games that are awesome, but also about cabinets and such. And if you have some input about this, don’t hesitate to talk about it in the comments!

jobocan arcade, Games, jobocan's arcade center