There is something very special about an arcade cabinet and I've made a couple in the past with varying degrees of success as I try and recreate that strong nostalgic feeling I have for retro gaming. Now that I'm more familiar with the process of building cabinets I decided to see how cheaply I could build me next one and this is the process I followed. For those wishing to make one but don't have the space then maybe you would be interested in building one of my smaller miniature versions here.
This is the finished product, a Mario themed table top arcade machine running a Retropie set up and as most of the material was sourced from scrap, the whole project (not including the cost of the monitor) came it at just over £20.
The buttons were the first purchased I made as you can't have a cabinet without necessary joystick and buttons. if you hunt around on eBay and prepared to wait a while for them to be shipped from China, you can find a USB joystick and button set for around £10.
As with previous builds I don't follow any plans, all measurements are based on the size of the monitor that I'm using at the time and this is no exception. I started making the control panel as shown below, cutting out the holes needed for the buttons. The nice thing is that if your cutting is a little messy, you can hide it pretty well with the button overlaps, making it appear neater.
The materials you are seeing for both the control panel and the frame below is all wood salvaged from an old cupboard. Once you have the control panel cut to a suitable size to accommodate your monitor, it is this panel that will govern the dimensions of the rest of the build going forward.
Below you can see me starting to put together the frame. This needs to be as sturdy as possible as whilst you can cut corners at various stages of the build, I would recommend that you take the time to make the frame as robust as possible. It's amazing how often a cabinet gets knocked about, even when people are being super careful, so make it as strong as possible.
Give the software a test at this stage. There's nothing more frustrating that having everything installed and things not to work. I am using an old Raspberry Pi but have previously used the very cheap Pi Zero to run RetroPie without any issues at all.
Once the frame is in place, you can start building around it. I've learnt that you can hide a great deal of the scruffiness you see in the photograph below when it comes to painting and covering the cabinet, so there's no need to worry that it's going to result in a messy build, just make sure the panels are one and everything's contained.
I've used expensive car vinyl wrapping in the past and that has worked out really well in producing a great finish. This time I wanted to keep costs to a minimum and opted for spray paint instead. My son chose the theme of this build to be Mario and so we picked up some cheap spray paint that matched the Mario blue perfectly.
The edging is a great way to hide any scruffy joins from the previous building stages. The easiest and cheapest option I have found is to use insulation tape and I found the perfect Mario red colour to compliment the blue.
From here it's a case of wiring everything up and testing once again. I've put together a short video of the process detailed in this post as well as the finishing stages. The more observant readers will notice that I installed the control panel the wrong way round with the joystick located on the right. Always double check things before committing!
Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want
I have always thought there is huge potential in transmitting data over the FM bands, especially when it involved one of my kite ideas. I once came up with the concept to fly a bunch of sensors via kites that would relay the information down on the ground via a low powered FM transmitter. This could then be adapted to broadcast your own recordings should you be at the beach with friends and wanted to broadcast your own radio show to the listeners below. There are many similar projects out there, take this Raspberry Pi project here for example. After buying a number of the old in-car FM transmitters from a car boot sale recently I decided to revisit this project and test it out only to find that the range of the things wasn’t very good at all. Although the older generation in-car FM transmitters are rumoured to have a better range than the more modern solutions, I was still only achieving a few metres. So I set about modifying the FM transmitter to see if I can boost its range some
I have always thought the mechanical fortune teller machines where a thing of wonder and I've always wondered about making one myself. I have previously experimented with making a proof of concept miniature version here but as I had some spare time on my hands I decided to scale up to a full sized cabinet. I started by rescuing an old wardrobe that was skipped and used the panels to put together the bottom half of the cabinet. The intention is to have the bottom half collecting the money and dispensing fortune cards, with the top half house Zoltar in a framed enclosure. I removed the insides of the miniature fortune teller and made sure they still work. A friend of mine gave me a nice 1d coin panel and I made sure that this worked with the existing coin acceptor. The brains of Zoltar runs off a simple Microbit . I love these little programmable boards, they're easy to use as well as cheap and are perfect for projects like this. The code is surprisingly simple too. The Microbi
