I love arcade cabinets. There is something about this towering device made of pressed wood and wires. Having grown up in the 80s going to the arcade was a huge point of excitement. I still really enjoy playing arcade cabinets. So when we were looking for fun things to add to our office I suggested the arcade machine. The people I worked for generously agreed that we should have a cabinet. I started to research what it would take to do so. I didn't want to just purchase a pre build mame X games in one machine. This would be cool but we are developers, I wanted to have something open and able to be hacked, updated, or our own games loaded to it.
My research led me to this sweet cabinet kit from mame room. This upright cabinet kit contained everything I needed for the shell of the cabinet. Next I needed controls and happens that mame room also sells this amazing quad player control board. https://www.mameroom.com/webstore.asp?productid=QUADCONTROLLER&category=157 With this controller we would be able to maximize the abilities of this cabinet allowing 4 player action.
For the controls I ordered controls boards from Happ. These are pretty awesome industry standard arcade buttons and controllers. And we got a pretty nice track ball that is wired up to work as a mouse. The buttons are all wired up according to the instructions the control board supplied. Even tho the boards each support 2 players, I needed to use one board per controller. The mapping for the second player just wouldn't work right. But if i kept it to one per player it was not hard to figure out the mapping from there.
I wired up the coin slot swapping out the incandescent bulbs that lit the coin returns with LEDs. The coin slots themselves I wired to buttons that are pressed on the controller. This allows us to map the mame emulator coin insert button to the actual coin insert.
The cabinet didn't have any setup for mounting the display. I used just a standard 28in lcd tv for the display. While I was putting this together, I took some measurements and off to the hardware store. And devised a way of mounting the screen inside the cabinet. Basically using the mounting bolt points and attaching them to a board that is mounted into the space needed.
The brains of the system, I mounted an OUYA into the controller panel. There is this smaller hole that is cut into the controller panel. Its made for this special turn knob controller that I had no plans for using. It turned out that this hole is the same size as the ouya power button. Making this a perfect place to mount the ouya. The Ouya turned out to be a pretty great choice for this system. There is a bunch of wonderful android games that work great with the controls. As well as there are a lot of really good emulators for playing all the other classics. In the end everyone latched on to playing 4 player towerfall action. This game is perfect in an arcade setting, taking great advantage of the 4 player support.
I designed the marquee graphic using a pac man font and a similar graphic to that of pac man. Had this professionally printed on quality vinyl for that real arcade quality. With a lamp being it lighting it up. Around the bottom trim of the screen, I added some cool custom graphics I made for some more life to it.
Overall this turned out as a pretty awesome cabinet. We had countless hours challenging each other on towerfall. It was a great fun thing that I think helped a lot with bringing co workers together. There quite a few nights we stayed a few hours after playing games against each other.
