Recently in Cocktail Arcade Cabinet Build Category

I've been out of town for most of the last four months. One of the first things I did after "docking" my laptop was fire up the arcade cabinet. It booted right up and I was very happy and relieved to see that none of the hard drives had died while I was away.

I store a copy of my Duplicity backups on my arcade cabinet (it is also my home file server), so I kicked off my script that rsyncs the backups on my laptop over to the arcade cabinet. Less than a minute later, I hear the drives and fans in the arcade cabinet spin down...

I scratched my head, walked back over, and turned it back on. This time it shut off about half way through the boot sequence. I got down on my back and crawled underneath. I felt like I was checking to make sure the oil filter on my DSM was snug (I'd had mine come loose before, the spindle screwed into the oil cooler could be problematic).

While I was looking up into the guts, I hit the power button. Things were pretty dark from that angle, and I didn't think to bring a flash light. I touched the CPU fan, it was spinning. I touched the power supply fan... It was not spinning.

At least it is an easy problem, just a dead power supply fan. I'm not surprised that it died, this power supply is probably over four years old by now.

The silver lining

My good friend Brian gave me one of his old video cards: an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 240. This card is a massive upgrade over the arcade cabinet's current NVidia GeForce 6200LE, and tons more horsepower than I'm going to need. The dead power supply is lacking the 6 pin PCIe power connector required by the new card.

I ordered a new power supply. It should be here in a few of days. I'll just have to survive without my home file server for a little while. This is so much better than coming home to a dead hard drive, or worse, TWO dead hard drives...

Update 2011-11-02:

The power supply arrived, but it didn't fix the problem... It powered up for a minute or two and then shut itself down. I crawled underneath the cabinet again and started poking at things with my finger and noticed that the CPU heat sink was wobbling:

The little nub that holds the heat sink clip snapped off. I ordered a new bracket, so now I get to wait again.

I got to take a look at the old power supply now that it is out of the case. It actually has two fans, but I couldn't see the second without removing the monitor. I tested it out by shorting pins 15 and 16 to start up the power supply. Both fans started right up.

I clearly remember sticking a "non conductive instrument" (aka a cheap ball point pen). I don't recall hearing the usual "THWAP, THWAP, THWAP" sound that usually occurs when you do that with a spinning fan. I'm starting to think that I should be questioning my sanity!

Our cocktail arcade cabinet build is finally completed. I'm very pleased with how everything came together. The quality of the cabinet ended up exceeding my expectations in every way I can think of. We learned many useful things along the way.

Some of the parts that we thought were going to be fast and easy turned out to be the most difficult and/or time consuming. We thought applying the vinyl and cutting the plexiglas would be quick and easy but that was probably the most time consuming part of the whole build. We thought that slotting the boards and fitting them together would be difficult but we easily had that all worked out on the first and second days.

Parts and Labor

The total cost of the materials for the shell, buttons, joysticks, and I-PAC4 was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. I had to buy the LCD monitor, that was about $150 (beware of LCD computer monitors). I had all the rest of the guts on hand already.

The labor is difficult to summarize. The two of us probably clocked in somewhere near 40 hours each working on the build over the space of about two months. Quite a bit of that time was spent trying to figure things out, redoing things we did wrong, or just plain old screwing around. With all we've learned along the way I bet we could build a better cabinet in half time.

Was it Worth the Effort?

It was absolutely worth the effort. I grew up playing lots of arcade games so just having the machine sitting in my office is enough to make me happy. The cabinet has been completed for almost a month now and very few days have gone by where somebody hasn't played with it for at least fifteen minutes.

I've wanted to build an arcade cabinet for at least the last ten years. I'm very glad I did, playing games on an arcade cabinet just feels so much different than playing them on a television or computer. I'm not entirely sure how to quantify the experience, though...

It very much reminds me of the difference between watching movies on a nice LCD television versus watching movies on an LCD or DLP projector. My DLP projector is pretty old. It is only an SVGA projector and the contrast ratio is certainly not the best but watching movies on it feels a lot more like you're sitting in a movie theater.

If you've been thinking about building an arcade cabinet for a long time my advice is to start building. It was easier to build than I expected it to be and it was worth every penny. I wish I built one ten years ago!

Is it Really Finished?

I don't know if I will ever consider the project totally finished. I think there will always be small changes to be made. For now I'm going to leave it alone.

The Next Cabinets

We're planning to build a small 16 inch tall bar top cabinet. We have an old 14 inch 700mhz laptop lying around that we plan to stuff inside. It isn't fast enough to play "modern" games from the middle of the 1990s but it plays the classic games just fine.

After that we'd like to build a low profile upright cabinet. We're thinking it will be about somewhere around 18 inches deep (not counting the control panel).

The Guts of the Table

The only new electronics I bought for the table were the I-PAC4, the buttons and joysticks, and the 24 inch LCD monitor. All the guts were transplanted from my home file server whose job used to be playing movies on my DLP projector.

Arcade Related Hardware

The computer hardware is mostly faster than it would need to be for an upright cabinet. It is an Athlon X2 3800+ with 1 GB of RAM and it has a 64MB NVIDIA 6200 LE PCIe video card.

NAS Related Hardware

The motherboard also has 6 SATA ports and I'm using every one of them. The arcade table is now the home of my file server. We build a little cage to hold seven 3.5 inch hard drives out of some of the left over building materials. Six would have been enough, but the wood we cut ended up being long enough for seven so that's what we have.

The boot drive is an old 320 GB SATA disk I had laying around. It holds all the data needed to play games on the cabinet. Then there are five 1 TB disks in a RAID 6 giving me about 3 TB of usable space. The RAID drives are set up to spin down shortly after the cabinet boots up.

I'm very happy that I'm able to use my cocktail cabinet as my home file server. The table is fairly bulky but it has a ton of room for computer hardware on the inside.

How the Hardware is Mounted

We had a whole bunch of leftover melamine panel from my DIY white boards. We cut one panel each to mount the motherboard, power supply, and the hard drive cage to. We cut slots in the sides of some 6 by 2 inch pieces of our 5/8 particle board and we glued/screwed those to sides of the interior of the table to use as rails.

The motherboard is attached to a melamine panel square with wood screws and some plastic spacers. The power supply is screwed and zip tied to a small panel. The original power supply we were going to use had four screw holes we could use, the power supply we ended up using only had two. The two screws are probably enough, the zip tie is really mostly there for my own piece of mind.

The melamine panels slide right down from the top into the rails. We glued/screwed small wood blocks onto the walls underneath the panels to use as bump stops so the components would drop right through to the floor.

There is a six inch wide shelf in the center of the table that the monitor sits on. We didn't end up having to measure that perfectly, we just used some rubber feet as spacers to push the shelf up just a bit so that the monitor is nearly pressed right up against the glass.

The Software

We're running 32-bit Ubuntu 10.10 for the operating system. We're using the Wah!Cade front end and SDLMAME and SDLMESS for all the emulated games.

Wah!Cade

I don't have much to say about Wah!Cade. I didn't try many other front ends so I can't really say if it is much better or worse than anything else. I'm happy with it so far. It looks fine and it is the config files are easy to work with.

In the future I would like a front end that would auto rotate the controls and display for me so that the controller that selects a game becomes player one. I can see this being pretty complicated to do properly, though. I have some games set to the forced faux cocktail mode and others are set to native cocktail mode. None of those settings will work very well if the game is rotated from portrait to landscape.

SDLMAME

SDLMAME is excellent. I wouldn't have built a cocktail cabinet if it weren't for the "new" cocktail video mode that splits the screen and shows a full display to player one and player two. This is a killer feature of SDLMAME and SDLMESS for me.

Every game I would ever want to play from up until at least the middle of the 1990s plays in cocktail mode without dropped frames at 720p on my hardware.

SDLMESS Saves the Day!

Using a computer LCD monitor almost ruined my cocktail cabinet. I was using Mednafen and Snes9x for NES and SNES emulation. I'm a big fan of Mednafen and both emulators are wonderful pieces of software.

My plan was to use the player 3 position, which is one of the long sides, as the seat to play NES and SNES and other games. With the poor visibility from the bottom of the display I was forced to rotate the video output using XRANDR. This really made my video card too slow to play and scale NES and SNES games. Mednafen and Snes9x don't have facilities to rotate the game output.

SDLMESS can not only rotate the display but it even supports SDLMAME's cocktail mode! SDLMESS isn't nearly as capable of an emulator as Mednafen or Snes9x and it is very picky about which game images you feed it. When a game works, though, it works very well.

Once I finished shoe horning SDLMESS into place it was pretty trivial to add TI 99/4a and Coleco Vision emulation to the cabinet. I'm very happy to know that my memory is correct. Munchman is a much better game than Pac-Man and TI Invaders is far superior to the Space Invaders! I also had the theme song from "The Attack!" stuck in my head for days...

I ended up wrapping all the emulators in little shell scripts that set the correct screen orientation and/or resolution. My front end is running rotated 180 degrees at 800x600 and SDLMAME and SDLMESS are running at normal orientation at 720p. I'm experimenting with running some native games, they tend to need to run with the screen rotated as well.

Cocktail Cabinets are More Expensive than Upright

Especially when they're four player... I wanted six buttons at each of the four control panels. I don't think there are any four player arcade games that use more than three buttons but I wanted the option to be able to play two player six button games in either portrait or landscape. Just about the only control interface that supports enough inputs for that is the I-PAC4 which costs more than twice as much as something like a GPWiz 40.

To run in the split screen cocktail mode requires more CPU. Scaling the larger output of the split screen cocktail mode requires more GPU. In general you'll need more CPU and GPU horsepower to drive a cocktail cabinet.

The blackened Plexiglas turned out really nice. We used a can of glossy spray paint to paint the back side of each pieces. They come out with a very shiny black color and have a very mirror-like reflective quality to them. Please excuse these early pictures. The panels were all still very dusty in the work shop.

We used the blackened Plexiglas for all the control panel surfaces, for the short vertical panels that cover up the control panel wiring, and also on the back wall of the control panel areas. We originally planned to cover the back walls of the control panels with vinyl. I'm glad we ran out of vinyl because the reflective Plexiglas looks REALLY nice back there. The reflections of the buttons in the back panel look quite awesome!

The Plexiglas makes for a nice smooth surface to rest your hands on but it is very hard to keep clean. Our panels are very mirror-like so fingerprints stand out a bit more than if we were just using clear Plexiglas to cover some artwork.

The Glass Tabletop

I don't seem to have any pictures of the glass tabletop being painted but there is a short video walking around the table before it was completely finished. In the video you can sort of see the poor viewing angle from the bottom side of the LCD panel that I described earlier. It gets much worse than that if you actually sit down on that side.

We ended up buying a 32x42 inch piece of glass to use as the surface of the table. It is 1/4 inch thick and has, I think, 4 inch radius corners. We were able to get this piece custom cut at a local glass shop for $55. We aren't having any problems with the 1/4 inch glass but I think it would probably be better to go with 3/8 or 1/2 inch instead.

We painted the underside of the glass just like the Plexiglas. First we taped off a rectangle to match the display area of our monitor as precisely as we could. Then we taped off the nicely rounded view ports over each control panel.

We sprayed a few coats of glossy black paint over the exposed glass, waited until the next day, and then peeled off the masking tape.

The glass sits on four little rubber bumpers with the painted side down. The paint comes off of the glass pretty easily. We've removed and replaced the glass at least a half dozen times so far and the paint has peeled off a bit right at the rubber bumpers. After we touch it up we might try taping off a few square inches underneath with electrical tape. We figure that should keep the paint from peeling.

T-Molding

The T-Molding was really easy to work with. Most of it we were able to just muscle into place with our thumbs and palms. Some spots didn't want to fit as easily, those we tapped in with a rubber mallet. Once it was in place we trimmed the end smooth with a razor blade: it cuts quite easily.

There are 90 degree bends on both sides of each control panel. I'm not terribly happy with those sharp bends. We cut out a big V from the back of the molding so it would bend that far but the bend is still a bit rounder than I would prefer. We also only have barely more than an inch of groove there for the end of the molding to grab onto. Two of them wouldn't stick on their own so we had to glue them.

One of my favorite parts of the entire cabinet is the piece of t-molding around the control panels that wraps all the way around the table. It really ties the cabinet together.

The Ugly Unfinished Bits

I shouldn't even be pointing this spot out. I doubt anyone would ever notice it in any pictures or videos of the completed cabinet. I sure notice them, though.

There's a 5/8 inch gap in the Plexiglas between each control panel. We could have worked a bit harder and got the Plexiglas to touch there but there would still be a seam to cover. We aren't entirely certain how we are going to cover it up.

One idea is to cover them up with tokens from meaningful arcades. We would need four of them, which might be difficult, and we'd still need to put something underneath them.

This article at blog.makezine.com got the gears turning in my head. I'm not so sure I would want to emboss anything but I bet I could bend some aluminum into some sort of clip to slide around the two pieces of Plexiglas.

I'm sure we'll come up with something to cover that gap. It isn't really hasn't been a priority so far. We really just want to get the cabinet up and playing games!

Applying the sticky back vinyl covering to the cabinet was very simple but time consuming process. We spray painted the cabinet around all the edges just in case the particle board was visible anywhere between the vinyl and the t-molding.

All we had to do was clean the surface, peel off part of the backing, and press it down onto the surface. We slowly peeled off the backing as we were applying more and more of the vinyl from one end of the surface to the other while being careful not to create any bubbles or creases.

After each piece was glued into place we had to trim around the edges with a razor blade. You have to make sure that the vinyl is flush with the edge of the board. If there is any overhanging vinyl it will be very obvious once the t-molding is put in place.

How Does it Look?

It looks very good. At this point I think it was well worth the time, effort, and money to go with the vinyl. It looks right and it feels like it belongs in an arcade.

Poor Planning

I didn't order quite enough vinyl... I'm pretty sure I forgot that we had to vinyl both sides of the board on the outsides of the cabinet. My poor planning actually forced us to improve the looks of the cabinet quite a bit. We decided to cover the back wall of each control panel with a piece of blackened Plexigas. The Plexiglas looks much, much better back there than the vinyl would. It has a lot more depth back there now, you can see the reflection of the buttons and joystick on the back wall now.

Alternatives to Vinyl

I really like the way the cabinet looks with the vinyl and I am glad we used it. We've been trying to think up a good alternative. The vinyl is expensive, partly because of the high shipping costs. The vinyl alone was probably almost 20% of the cost of the entire cabinet. Applying the vinyl to the cabinet was a pretty time consuming process. I'm pretty sure it took us more than two full evenings to finish. That's probably over 6 hours.

The best alternative we've come up with so far is melamine board from Home Depot.

We used two 4x8 foot sheets of 5/8 inch particle board to build the cabinet at a cost of about $17 per sheet. It took about $90 worth of vinyl, including the cost of shipping, to cover the cabinet. If we wanted a white cabinet we could have saved about $50 and 6 hours.

Melamine is a plastic. I recently used vinyl dye to color my LCD monitor stand and laptop rack, and I would expect vinyl dye to cover melamine just as fully and easily as it covers PVC pipe.

Vinyl dye costs about $6 per can. I'm pretty certain we could dye an entire melamine cocktail cabinet with less than two cans of spray paint and I am absolutely certain it would take way less than 6 hours.