Album: 05-24 MAME Cabinet

Album:2002:05-24 MAME Cabinet

I found an old Dig-Dug arcade game in San Jose. The exterior was solid, though was missing some pieces from a conversion, and the interior was in shambles. That was fine with me, because I wanted to use it as a MAME cabinet to hide my data/mp3 server - so I cleaned out the interior and dropped the server in.

I hooked up a computer monitor, built an arcade control panel that can interface with the computer (using I-Pac. I installed MAME, an arcade game emulator (as well as a bunch of other emulators, such as Atari 2600). Presto, I have an entire arcade (over 10 thousand games..) in my living room, and I have my server neatly hidden out of view.

Nobody's noticed the ethernet cable coming out of the back of my Dig-Dug machine yet. ;)

I wrote a simple curses-based front-end for my cabinet which rocks and is easy to control from the control panel.

So here's the construction of my almost-finished MAME cabinet:

The cabinet
with the arcade monitor pulled (you can see burn-in of the basketball game on the screen) ( comments)

The back
of the cabinet after I've started gutting it ( comments)

Monitor stand
and braces to keep it from moving ( comments)

The new monitor
installed running linux, but with no bezel or controls ( comments)

The start
of my new control panel ( comments)

Should have done
in the first place: created a panel template ( comments)

The control panel,
before installation, but connected to the Ultimarc iPac2 PS/2 switch converter ( comments)

The bottom
of the panel ( comments)

The panel installed
(still needs an overlay) ( comments)

New system
I replaced the antiquated dual 133MHz that I found on the street with a 1.2GHz AMD with this snifty case (which never gets seen once it's tucked inside) ( comments)

Keyboard tray
slides out from behind the control panel (and covers up the wires) - using cabinet sliders from Home Depot. ( comments)

Thermaltake (90mm) fan
I installed under the top vent (pardon the dust). Supposedly the fan adjusts speed based on temp, but it's probably going to be on all the time. I extended the fan cable down to the case with speaker wire :) ( comments)