Arcade Dreams – Part 1

Whether or not you enjoy retro games or think they’re a relic from another era, I think every gamer can at least see the appeal of the classic arcade machine. There’s nothing like huddling around an old CRT monitor with your mates playing legendary titles like Street Fighter II or Turtles in Time. As someone who appreciates retro and modern games equally, I’d love to own a genuine arcade machine, but they’re difficult (and expensive!) to track down.

So when my friend Stephen approached me with the idea of putting together an all-in-one MAME (“Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator”) cabinet, I jumped at the chance, more so because he had a real budget to buy the needed parts. As we approach the end of the build, I thought it’d be a good idea to record our failures and victories, and ultimately show off the final result. Let’s do this!

Initial Preparation: Before you even think of building anything, you’ll need to decide what type of cabinet you want. Are you making a traditional upright machine, or something more grandiose like a racing rig or perhaps a cocktail table? In our case, we chose a four-player cabinet, in the traditional upright style, with an old 21″ CRT TV (for that arcade-perfect picture), which we “borrowed” from Stephen’s workplace. I’ve got a fairly modern PC lying around spare to power the software, although even a decent netbook will run everything fine if you keep the system clean.

The next step is figuring out the construction of the cabinet itself. There are dozens of places online to buy buttons, sticks and marquees, but finding the wood required to build the unit can be a real challenge. In general, we’d highly recommend finding someone who sells pre-cut kits. In the end, we placed a custom order with Craig at Turnarcades, who offers kits for cabinets, cocktail tables and bar tops, including the electronics. Once you’ve sorted that out, you’ll have to get it delivered. We arranged a pick-up job at ANYVAN for a reasonable £70 total, and we were on our way.

The Build, Day One: We were pretty excited when everything arrived, to say the least. It’s initially daunting looking at over 70KGs of flat-packed wood, but after opening the big box marked “control panel” parts, our excitement returned. There’s nothing quite like playing with a big bag of arcade buttons. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Big kid, me? The very thought!

We ran into our first problem when we did a real inventory of the parts. All of the electronics and cabinet panels was there, but we were missing two of the four support jousts. A quick trip to B & Q sorted this out, but it was a bit of hassle to stop mid-build. For the most part, the rest of the day was a success. Fitting most of the panels was easy, although I’d really recommend you have more than two people to help keep everything in check. We did run into one issue with the weaker wooden panels cracking – don’t tighten those screws too much! – but by the end of the night, we were ready to measure out the last panel: the monitor shelf.

That’s all for now! Join me next time, where we’ll be discharging a CRT so it doesn’t kill one of us, painting lots and lots of wood, and finally setting up MAME (and other emulators) for endless nights of arcade fun.