opicron Posted October 7, 2013 Share Posted October 7, 2013 Ever since I was playing TMNT with my friends in the local arcade it has been a childhood wish to own my own arcade machine. Now after many years I have found the time to build one. In this post I will expand on the build process. Step 1 – Custom design in Sketchup Before actually building anything I started work on the cabinet design. Of course I have been influenced by many designs freely available on the internet. None of them seemed fit for my purpose so I made my own from scratch loosely based on a few other designs. What seemed stange to me in most of the designs found on the web was that the side panels were very flimsy. Most builders used two panels of MDF to construct one side panel for their cabinets. I started working with a 32mm thick MDF plate for the side panels, resulting in an extremly sturdy build. Not to mention less work during the build! I went as far as incorperating all the controls into the design too. This made the control panel design complete and meant I did not have to cut the control panel on my own afterwards (big plus!). However it took me pretty long to make all the design/control choices based on information from the nets only. Step 2 – The MDF Work After finishing the design in SketchUp and exploding the panels onto larger “panels” the preparations were done. The only thing I had to do is offer the exploded designs (with measurements) to my local CNC woodworker to receive the seperate panels. After seeing the result I truly advice everyone to bring your panel designs to one CNC woodworker because the end result is so perfect. Especially the control panel is amazing! Step 3 – Controls Adding the controls to the control board was quite straight forward to do. I started adding the sanwa buttons and iPac board. Afterwards I went ahead and mounted the trackball and 8-way joysticks. Step 4 – The Hardware An major factor in deciding my computer setup was the fact I wanted to avoid an graphics card. I settled on trying the internal GPU of the Core I3 which is the Intel HD4000. This was a little gamble because it might not be strong enough, however it handles Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition on 1080p and the Dolphin WII emulator easily. When deciding which television to buy I realized it needed to be as input-lag free as possible. After many many reviews and technical specifications the Samsung UE23F5000 won easily. It only has 24ms lag, which is quite low (lowest I found was about 19ms). TV: Samsung UE32F5000 CPU: Core I3 3250 Mobo: Asus P8H77-I Cooler: Stock Case: Antec ESK 110 VESA PSU: Stock in case Memory: Corsair 4gb 1600 2x DIMMS SSD: OCZ Agility 3 128gb Step 5 – The Software Getting the software straight on the arcade machine was the most work by far. The following software has been used. HyperSpin HyperLaunch AutoHotkey Mouse Speed Switcher (need to try Autosensitivity) Windows 7 Boot Updater MAME (custom build with no nag screen and skip rom boot options) Many other emulators I tried to get all emulators to display an crt look. With MAME this is done through HSLS and it just looks great. A lot of time went into creating the different themes for HyperSpin, as I did not like many of the existing themes I went ahead and made (or customized) many of my own. Check out the video for a fraction of themes in my HyperSpin. A lot of people I see are trying to get as many games on their machines as possible. My own goal was being able to only load a custom pick of games which intrested my in my youth and further along the path. This results in a clean HyperSpin spinner with all games from different era’s and consoles without all the sub menus. -- More pictures can be found on the blog http://opicron.eu/wp/tutorial/custom-arcade-machine-diy/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pietie Posted October 7, 2013 Share Posted October 7, 2013 Congrats on getting this far! I like your mslug themes. After seeing the result I truly advice everyone to bring your panel designs to one CNC woodworker because the end result is so perfect. Especially the control panel is amazing! My brother suggested I do the same thing and I think it gives a great result...but for me the project was about the DIY part. I absolutely suck at woodwork but I enjoyed the challenge. After many hours and many tubs of wood filler I'm quite proud of my build. I just wish my cabling was half as neat as yours! Getting the software straight on the arcade machine was the most work by far. Haha, can't agree more! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
opicron Posted October 10, 2013 Author Share Posted October 10, 2013 I need to share all those themes once. Haven't checked out how to do that. But if its easy I would. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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