Building an Arcade Machine - Design and Build

Since last time, I've got the control board setup and working now. I've been working on setting up the software side of this project - which I'll go into later. I wanted to see how well my controller worked. And as you can see from the picture, it works perfectly. So now I have something to play with while I build the rest of my machine.

I've started laying out my design for this new cabinet. I wanted to go with a Galaga style cabinet, but I also want to modify it slightly. These things can be huge monsters, and I wanted to make sure the it would fit in my house, and that I could actually move the sucker.

My last builds where a two man job if I wanted to move them. I started out by roughing out a style that matched what was in my head.

As you can see, it's pretty close. The original cabinet is about 30 inches deep. I wanted this one to be no more than 24 inches. This means less wood to buy, and it'll fit in my house. Since I am using an LCD panel monitor, I wouldn't need all that extra depth anyway.

Next I cut out both the side panels, and using a slot cutter bit on my router, I cut the slots for the T-molding. I had a short piece left over from my old build, so I was able to try it out for size. At this point I wasn't sure on what colour to pick, but I always liked this Galaga green.

Once the groove was cut I could start attaching my supporting framing.

Even though my intention was to build a lighter cabinet, I decided to use particle-board for the sides for a few reasons. Even though it is very heavy and adds a great deal of weight to the overall cabinet, it's cheap, and very smooth. It requires almost no finishing work. Just sand the edges, prime it, and paint. It's also a good deal cheaper than the plywood equivalent. I don't regret the decision.

Next time I'll show you how I framed and added supports.

Assembling my controller board

Now that my controller board electronics are done, I need to build the controller board. For the controls, I am using X-Arcade parts. These are actually left over buttons and joystick from my previous builds. One think to note. If you every build your own arcade machine, but sure to

not cheap-out on your hole saw. I did, and I paid the price. It took me three tries to finally get it right. You will need a 1 1/8th inch spade bit, or hole saw. The more common 1 inch spade will not work, and will leave you manhandling your holes.

I walked around Home Depot for a while before I made my decision on what I would make my control board out of. I am very please with my final design. It looks really good.

Once I put this all together, I started to wire it up. It took a couple hours and about 25 feet of wire, but everything works perfect!

Next time I'll start working on the cabinet.

Building my new Arcade Machine - Part 2.

Building the Controller board.

Building an arcade cabinet is challenging enough, but I also wanted to build my own controlle
r board. This is the electronic controller thatinterfaces the computer with the arcade buttons and joystick. There are a few commercially available boards available, but I wanted to save a couple bucks and build my own. I was also looking forward to the challenge of doing it.

The method is pretty straight forward - hack a keyboard. Since MAME uses a computer keyboard to control everything, all I needed to do was rip some poor unsuspecting keyboard asunder, and use the small electronic board inside to connect up to my arcade buttons. This is actually slightly challenging, and requires a lot of patients. I went through a few keyboards before I found one that would be easy enough to work with my system.

If you've never seen the inside of a computer keyboard, you may be surprised to see that there is not a lot there. It's basically just two thin sheets of clear plastic with wire tracings that meet up at the position of every key of the keyboard. All these tracings then lead to a small control board, in most cases, about one inch by four inches. The tracings form a complex matrix that in turn allows the electronics to know which two tracings are connecting a circuit. It's pretty

amazing looking, and I'm sure that some poor guy had one heck of a time figuring this out for the first time.

What I then needed to do was map out the tracings to the specific keys that I wanted to use on my arcade machine. There are some standard keys that you us

ually use with MAME games. For example, the '1' key is the player one start button. The '5' key is the player one insert coin button. I needed to decide which keys I needed to use, and map them out.

At this point in the design process I really hadn't made a final decision on the layout of my controller, but I wanted to get started in the mapping process. So I decided to just map everything while I was at it, and make my final decision later.

There are a couple of ways to do this mapping. I could visually follow each path, and not were it intersects with other paths, and then figure out what keyboard key it was. I could use a multi-meter and point and note each keys location. In the end I decided to be a little more creative, and devised a more visual method for finding the key locations on the keyboard.

Using my scanner I scanned in each side of the plastic film, and popped them into photoshop. I then used the fill bucket to fill each tracing with a different colour. Then all I had to do was look at where each key location was and note the two colours. In this way I was able to map all the keyboard key colours, and which pin was which colour.

I numbered one back of pins on the controller board, and lettered each pin on the other bank. I then made up a sheet with key colours, and was able to translate them into pins. In this manner, pin E-18 could be the 'ESCAPE' key location. Which is another important MAME key.

Once I had the keys mapped, I then had to figure out exactly which keys to use. So I made a decision on what my controller would look like, and which keys I was going to use. I mounted the keyboard controller to a small board, and began wiring out the keys I needed.

In the end, it took me about 2 hours to complete the entire task.

The keyboard was $10, and the wire connectors were about $4. So I built my controller for about $14, saving about $46 and giving me a feeling of accomplishment to boot.

Building a new MAME Arcade Machine!

There has been a little itch in the back of my mind for the last several months. Sort of like a tickle that's been getting bigger and bigger. I've built a few arcade cabinets in the past, and just last year sold the machine I built for myself. I wouldn't say that I regret that decision - I don't. There were a few good reasons that I wanted to get rid of it. But, as time went on I remembered how much I
enjoyed the building of the machine, more so than even owning a completed one.

So, a couple weeks ago, I started the process of building a new one. This time around I am taking more pictures and will use this blog as a guide for others to build there own arcade machines too. The look and flavour will be different for sure, but you can use this blog as a guideline for your own project build.

First, the planning. The machines I've built in the past were

based on the Defender style cabinet. This time I wanted to try something different. My all time favourite arcade game was Galaga, and it was housed in a Pac Man style cabinet. So, for a challenge, I decided to use that style for my design.

I also wanted to make it a little bit smaller too. One of the big reasons that I got rid of my last machine was because it was just so big. With this build, I want to make the cabinet smaller. To accomplish this I decided to use an LCD monitor and not go with a cheaper, or traditional CRT tube monitor. Those things add so much bulk and weight to the machine, it becomes almost impossible to move around if need be.

So, with the basic plans drawn out, I made my first trip to

Home Depot for this project! YEAH! On a side not, a Pontiac Vibe can hold more than you would think. :) This was the first of a few trips. I am trying to keep the weight down as much as possible on this cabinet, so I decided to use plywood for the construction material.

In Part two, I'll start to cut and build my new arcade cabinet.