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Unfortunately I did not take any pictures during the construction phase of the cabinet.   But here it is completed sitting in my living room, ... and I must say it looks better then any original arcade game I ever had :^)  

In the end I decided to use oak, with an oak stain and polyurethane, and a laminate on the control console.  

I had an old ViewSonic 21" P815 monitor sitting around which is what dictated some of the cabinet sizes.   I decided I did not want any plexiglas in front of the monitor. 

The PC is some old 500Mhz Intel PIII system I also had sitting around.  It runs almost all the games, and certainly runs all the old games I cared about.   A big hurdle is to stop thinking about the game as a PC and wishing it would run the new cool PC games as well - it's just not worth it.  Instead think of it as a classic arcade game that just happens to runs lots of different arcade games (and some pretty news ones too).  The PC is nothing more then part of its guts to make it work.  A nice easy replaceable part.  Right now I'm running in on Win98, but may update to XP so I can use the remote console features to make it easy to admin right from my office.

For the sound system I didn't have anything laying around that would work and look good.  So I went shopping to see what I could find.  In the end I decided that I could pop the grills of the Creative Inspire 2.1 system and mount them on the front of the cabinet with the speakers mounted behind them.  The grills are real nice slim line cloth that look very good.  As a bonus it has a wired remote which I was mounted in the front for easy volume control.  (Bottom grill is the subwoofer.  Two grills about the monitor are the stereo fronts.)

As a side note.. it just so happens that the emulator's sound for asteroids is not correct.  This is about the only game that has such a problem.  (Asteroids used desecrate sound generating circuitry which the emulator I'm using tries to emulate the circuitry and generate the resulting wave forms, as oppose to just playing recorded samples of the sound).  At first this bugged me, but right now anyway I think I just happen to have a decent solution for that small problem :^)



Miscellaneous Construction Parts
Oak Plywood Home Depot. 3 Sheets of 8x4' 3/4" oak plywood.
Stain Home Depot. MinWax Wood Finish / Golden Oak 210b.
Clear Coat Home Depot. MinWax Fast Drying Polyurethane.
Laminate Home Depot. 2x4' Laminate Home Depot
T-Molding Happ Controls. Part Number: 49-0999-00.  I bought 100' but I only used something like 80.    I took my a while to find the proper router bit to use here.  None of the ones I had were it.  You want a 1/16" T-Slotting or Slot Cutter bit.
Plexiglas Lowe's. Optix Acrylic 30x36" 0.080" thick.  I used to layers of this to sandwich the Marquee which was printed at Kinkos on white bond paper, then placed behind the frame I screwed in from the front with brass screws.
   
Monitor Old 21" ViewSonic Monitor I had hanging around.
Audio Creative Inspire 2.1 sound system.

 
       
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This page was last modified on May 28th 2009

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