/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>Find room
>Buy arcade games via amazon;eBay;other websites
>Put them in said room
> Set it up real nicely
>Make sure you receive the key.

Hi op,

Go to the Build Your Own Arcade Controls site:
byoac.com

Specifically, take a look at their wiki and forums. This is where I got most of the info for my MAME cabinet.

http://www.dragonslairii.com/Arcade/DL2/Cabinet/default.asp

Use a gaming PC as a base. Install MAME on it. Build the controller part using Seimitsu buttons and Sanwa joysticks. For the controller electronics, you can use some types of keyboard, USB gamepad PCBs, or specialized hardware.

>>12095
I'm also building my own arcade machine.

see
>>14604

How good are you with wood working?
Do you want to build a cabinet from scratch, or do you want to gut out a old one?

Mame arcade machines cost a lot of time and money to make.

http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/faq.htm

Ah, alright OP. I can actually sort of help you out with this.


Okay so first of all; you're going to need a base to hold the system in as ; >>14668
mentioned. You want it to be MAME. You can go with either a PC, or an old hacked XBOX for this. Luckily, I have seen old Xbox's able to emulate CPS3 games (3s, etc.) but if you want to get even more modern day fighters , I would recommend building a PC that's able to do things like that. There are Arcade RIPS for games such as Blazblue CS 2 , Arcana Heart 3, and even King of Fighters 13, so I would straight up say PC, but depending on your budget, well, you could always go old XBOX.

Now I want to ask if you're building the cabinet as an old American Style one or not? Because most fighting games are played on Japanese Style Cabinets that use ball tops instead of bat top sticks. An example of a Japanese cabinet would be an Astrocity or a Vewlix Cabinet. I actually prefer these for fighters on the arcade I go to out of town because of how comfortable they are to play in. Season's Beatings had a few of these too!

OP, check this out and use it as a guide on what not to do;

http://www.wickedretarded.com/~crapmame/index.html

>>14842
After you have the initial shape of it down; you can move onto parts and stuff.

http://www.lizardlick.com/
http://akihabarashop.jp/

and the Tech Talk section on Shoryuken.com 's forum are actually where I would recommend you start looking for parts and layouts. Most fighting games tend to use Sanwa or Seimitsu parts though. There's also Korean fanta parts as well, which I have heard are arguably as good as Sanwa, but feel very much like Seimitsu.

Anyways, then you have to worry about the button layout of the arcade cab. Some games use 6 buttons, other games use four. I would personally just put in a 6 button layout since most Capcom based fighting games do this. and then adjust accordingly for every other game. You almost never see a fighting game use all 8 buttons from a TE stick. Unless you're using macros, but still. Also avoid buying Arcade-X or whatever it is. That stick is a piece of garbage and you're most likely going to save yourself a lot of stress and money by just building the controller portion yourself.

Last thing I want to mention is finding a proper CRT TV for your mame set up. I wouldn't use a modern day flat screen or HD TV for one just because there is input lag on those TV's which really make it iffy to play fighters on. You can easily just go to a Flea-Market or Thrift Store to find a monitor though. They don't cost that much anymore.
The rest is pretty much up to your creative mind, and a soldering gun.

Fucking awesome, this is exactly what I was hoping for when /diy/ was unveiled, this and headphone mods and amps.

i recommend buying a generic jamma wired woody, then hooking up a mame pc with arcadevga/jpac. then you also have the advantage of being able to play original arcade boards on it.
custom cabs are horrible :(

i have a copy of the original pac-man (.com file if i recall) on a tandy1000SX running DOS 3.3

have no idea how to get it off of there, but that might help you OP

dude all you need is right here:

http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepprojectmame.htm

A lot of good advice here, but as a guy that works at an arcade, a request please.

If you aren't very skilled in building an actual wood frame for your cab, try to get a junker cab to convert into your game. If you look on cragslist or can find a local company that runs a route, you can usually get a old cab for $50 or so.

Like I said, get a junker. These things aren't being built anymore, and it's sad when someone takes a classic cab (like a Pac man or whatever) and gut the thing to run MAME. There are a lot of shit games/cabs out there that were already converted from one game to another and make decent MAME cabs

>>15134
That looks amazing, would take some work to look that good and would be a fucking awesome project in theory to fuck about with, but really >>15167 is probably right.
It would probably particularly frustrating to find it's harder than it might seem and coming out of it with a lot of wasted money and a shitty looking cab... well it makes me wish I'd done woodwork way back when.

>>15187

If you've got the cash, and lack the ability to use a saw, there's always kits. Arcade Shop Amusements, NorthCoast Custom Arcades, and so on.

And let's not forget it doesn't HAVE to be that size for a cab. I've seen mini countertop cabs and just a lap sized console with a TV out to hook in to whatever TV is out there.

>>15167

I'm being serious here... what's the difference between a junker and Pac-Man? Is it the game? Are there no junker Pac-Man's? Help me out a bit. I want to do something similar to OP but having been on arcadecontrols.com and seen what good is and what bad is, I feel like my first attempt might very well end up in the bad category.

>>15202

What I mean is I have seen online where people find an old classic, like Pac-Man, Mario, etc, in beautiful condition. And instead of keeping it as it is, they gut it, repaint it, and build a MAME out of it. To me, that's like finding a nice classic car for cheap and modding it for a demolition derby.

Because game design gravitated to a JAMMA standard, companies sold kits consisting of mainly a new JAMMA board and graphics to transform an existing game into a new game. So, these cabinets have been stripped down, repainted, reused over and over again, and so on. These cabinets are great because the damage has already been done. What's another modification?

And some cabinets are just trashed. Chipped wood, extra holes on the control panel, missing parts (probably used in another game). These don't take too much work to rebuild. For holes and chips, Bondo and sandpaper to a great job.

I'm getting ready this week to change out a crappy gun game of ours (Johnny Nero: Action Hero) into a 60-in-1 system for sale. Which means I have to gut the Control Panel, Bondo the Holes, drill new ones, and redo the graphics to make it look decent. I reuse crap games like this all the time. I've actually threatened my boss bodily harm when he asked me if I would convert our mostly working Mario Bros to a 60 in 1 a few months back

>>15202
Pac-Man cabs are really old, and if I had to assume, use a four way lever system instead of an eight way gate as most other arcades do. This is just me assuming though, you're more likely to get what you want if you find an old Namco cabinet as a base.

Also this thread makes me contemplate if we should start having Custom Arcade Stick and MAME Cab Generals.

>>15233
We certainly should, then in a couple months after the mod has become bored of his new play thing people will complain about the stale nature of the threads sage it to hell and it'll just be one of those annoying things...
I wouldn't mind it every now and then, but obligatory thread for the front page at any given time? No thank you.

>>15238
Well, weekly then. I mean Mame cabs are pretty fun to make, and who doesn't love some old arcade vidya? Even if you don't play it, it's still one hell of a decoration piece. Same goes for custom / modded arcade sticks too. Expensive but not that much, cool decoration piece, and hell, you can show off your work to all the con game room people, your friends who come over for vidya, or use it if you're getting into the fight scene.

One mistake a lot of people make is making their cabs look like shit. Conversion or scratch built, they do stuff that just looks terrible.

Don't cover your game with some weird decals or sideart. If you're converting an existing cab, thats one thing, but don't go out and slap some random side are on the side of a MAME machine (no matter how awesome it looks on an original game).

Don't do the custom "100 tiled marquees" marquee, they always look like shit. "But they are my favorite games" or "they are whats installed on the machine." Still, don't do it, they look like shit and are hard to read. Also, no printer paper marquees, there is a reason original marquees are printed on glass with special paints.

When all else fails, black is your friend. If you're building from scratch or converting a cab that needs lots of cosmetic repairs and the art is either badly damaged or non-existent just paint the thing black. Don't cover it in shelf liner paper or old sideart or any of that shit.

Don't make a monstrosity control panel. Couple of joysticks, half a dozen buttons per player and thats it. Have a look around at some peoples custom cabs, they are terrible looking and hard as fuck to play with. If you want a spinner or a trackball or a wheel, make a second/third/whatever control panel and trade the sucker up between games.

Its better to convert a JAMMA cab form the mid 80's to the late 90's (the fighting game era) then a dedicated machine. This is less to do with style then it is to do with playability. Dedicated machines tend to have limited control panel space and are a pain to make control panels for but JAMMAs were designed to be converted and are easier to work with. If you can get an old fighting game cab, all the better. They have probably already been converted and gutted several times and will be cheap.

>>15609

Here, found a link that sums this up. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

http://wickedretarded.com/~crapmame/index.html

I remember years ago seeing a premade arcade cabinet at toys r us... for an NES. You were supposed to buy the shell and then add your own NES and TV, though it did have built in arcade sticks.

>>12095
>dat cabinet

I love Heavy Metal, and that case build.

>>15609

Very good points

>>12095
I worked on arcade games for 15 years.
It's easier and an order of magnitude cheaper to buy an existing arcade game cabinet and refurbish it than it is to build one from scratch. If you have lots of money to blow on this you can also buy brand new cabinets with no game installed in them wired for the JAMMA standard so all you have to do is install the game logic board and graphics on the outside of the cabinet and you're ready to go.