First custom 2 player fullsize Hyperspin cabinet

[Inspector]

Hi guys,

 

After lurking my way around here for quite some time now I wanted to show you guys my own build cabinet. It's 100% custom and not like any other cabinet out there. My brother and I love cabinets and retrogames since we were kids so it was just a matter of time before we deceided to build our own cabinet. We have been collecting games and consoles for a long time and always kept our collection up to date at http://retrogamebrothers.com. Therefor we deceided to build a custom cab dedicated to our alias the "retrogamebrothers".

 

Lets start of with the finished product.

 

 

Also see our cabinet in action

 

If you don't get anything we say, its because its in Dutch.

 

Internals and software

 

Processor: Intel XEON quadcore 3Ghz

Memmory: 8GB

HDD: 1TB, 7200RPM (Games)

SSD: 512MB Samsung portable (OS)

2 Large fans (intake and outtake for airflow at the back)

Stereo speakers

WiFi USB stick for updates, network games and remote access.

Sticks: Sanwa sticks with 8 diagonal restrictor plates

Buttons: Default arcade buttons

Controller: iPAC2

Monitor: Dell Ultrasharp U2412M

OS: Windows 7

Frontend: Hyperspin

Emulators: MAME only

 

Materials used

 

2 large boards of MDF

2 Cans of Black spraypaint

Lots of black sticker foil

2 Vynil stickers for the sides

Vynil sticker for the marquee

2 pieces of Plexiglass for the marquee and the button panel

Lots of screws, woodglue and wooden strips for construction

RGB LED lightstrip for the footer

LED lightstrip for the marquee

Cardboard for the monitor backplate

Coinslot, keylocks, wire, wire, wire and more wire

Glass window to cover the monitor and monitor backplate

 

Construction

 

We started out by drawing our ideal cabinet on a piece of paper. What do we want? CRT of LCD? standup cabinet or tabletop? 2 player or 4 player? Finally we deceided and skeched some mockups of what we would like. Not much later we started thinking about sizes and shapes and got to the following final draft.

 

 

After that we started cutting out the panels.

 

 

Time to apply some paint to the inside of the sidepanels

 

 

Then, order some goodies and start working on the foot stand (with collapsable wheels)

 

 

Creating the frontpanel with the coinslot

 

 

Start putting it toghetter to get an idea of the result

 

 

Start working on the electronics and PC

 

 

Creating the art and finnishing the cabinet

 

 

Putting it toghetter for the last time

 

 

Almost done!

 

In conclusion

 

It was a lot of work! We had never done anything remotely to working with wood or building a cab but we are really happy with the result! It took us about 3 months to build the whole cab. Since we only worked on it in the evenings and weekends it took us a bit longer then expected. Also figuring out the best way to run HyperSpin, MAME, mapping the buttons, creating configs, downloading movies etc. turned out to be waaaaaaay more work then I thought. By using a subscription to both HyperSpin and EmuMovies I spared mysqlf quite some time.

 

We made the artwork ourself. Since I created an 8 bit retro game a while back I thought it would be cool to run the game on the cabinet en use the artwork for the cabinet as well. It displays my brother and me in 8 bit style and also uses our logo for the marquee and sideart. You can check the game out if you want. Its free, open source and available for MAC, Windows and Linux. http://tweakers.net/acties/tweakbattle I created it with a good friend of mine and the game is build in C++ with SDL. All graphics are created in the Gimp.

 

The cabinet powers on with one single button on the back. It lights the marquee, footer RGB led, LEDS for the coinslot (not in the pictures), the monitor and the PC. The PC resumes Windows from an image stored on the SSD so the cabinets boots into Hyperspin in about 15 seconds. You never see anything from Windows since I modified the resume screen and from there it goes straight into Hyperspin wich was still loaded in memory.

 

We only used MAME games since we love throwing in quarters and play the games we used to play when on holiday. We wanted the authentic feel so no SNES or other retro consoles are installed. We deceided to go with LCD though. It tunred out great! The cabinet is a bit lighter and thinner then using a CRT. Using the MAME HLSL shaders we emulated a great retro look on the LCD. My little nephew even told me to get a new graphics card since it all looked so "blurry" and "pixelated". Just how I wanted it!

 

We recently started building our second cabinet so I hope you guys like the build. Please leave me some feedback on what you love or where yout think we could have done better. We love to learn from it! If you need some info on how we did things, feel free to ask. Thanks for checking this out!

Cheers, Retrogame brothers.

[SubZero]

Sweet cab!!! very pro. i thought the video was English so i couldn't understand it at first because i was focused on English...........naderhand snapte ik waarom ik het niet verstond, nu wel haha

[Inspector]

Sweet cab!!! very pro. i thought the video was English so i couldn't understand it at first because i was focused on English...........naderhand snapte ik waarom ik het niet verstond, nu wel haha

Hahaha thanks, yeah I should put in a disclaimer telling the video is in Dutch. Ondanks dat je dat al door had

[Metalzoic]

Wow. I really, really like this one guys. Good work.

I absolutely love your cab and especially your control panel. Having the CP integrated like that (like an actual arcade cabinet) looks so much better than the overlarge ones that spill over the edge and are wider than the cab itself. I also love that you kept it arcade only with no consoles. I recently did that myself and deleted all my console systems, all their roms/iso's etc... I now like it better with just arcade systems and PC arcade style games.

You're inspiring me to completely rebuild my control panel to be smaller so that it looks better.

[Inspector]

Wow. I really, really like this one guys. Good work.

I absolutely love your cab and especially your control panel. Having the CP integrated like that (like an actual arcade cabinet) looks so much better than the overlarge ones that spill over the edge and are wider than the cab itself. I also love that you kept it arcade only with no consoles. I recently did that myself and deleted all my console systems, all their roms/iso's etc... I now like it better with just arcade systems and PC arcade style games.

You're inspiring me to completely rebuild my control panel to be smaller so that it looks better.

 

Thanks man! Really appreciate it. Let me know how your panel turns out, would love to see it when its done. For me what really made the panel was to cover it with some plexiglass. The buttons hold it on its place so its a neat transparant layer over your artwork. Turned out better then I hoped.

[Agrajag]

Excellent work! Really impressive results for woodworking novices. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

[dirtynerd]

Very awesome i can't wait to start my first build soon just getting every part first got all the tools now just waiting on my bottons and i pac-2 and the build will start great job on taking photos along the way ill try do the same

[Rotgut]

Super kick-ass!  Nice and clean and professional looking!  Hats off!

[mange181]

Wow! Impressive. I love your hi quality artwork. Going to take a closer look at the process tomorrow. Thanks for posting!

[SIMPLYAUSTIN]

Yeah mate, this is quality building, I need to take a closer look myself. There's nothing I like more than looking at peoples hard work.

 

This is perfectly clean and proffesional. Hats off guys