© Arcade Club 2016
Building an arcade cabinet, can’t be that difficult, right? Turns out, it’s more difficult than we first thought. What design do we want? How do we get the measurements, what hardware do we use? We plan to use it as a promotion stunt for our game Alpha. We’ll be able to bring it to events to show people an arcade version of our game, and hopefully get them interested. And of course we are going to play some good old arcade games on it ourselves!
There are a lot of designs to choose from. We ended up sticking with the design of the Williams Defender. Because of its size, and relatively easy-to-saw shape. We wanted the wood to be pre-sawn into smaller pieces so that it’ll fit in a small car. So we’ve been at multiple big DIY stores but they don’t like our big order, and most of them are not precise enough about sawing the wooden planks in the dimensions we want.
What we have now
We have most things ready now. The most important thing missing is the wood for the cabinet. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll have the wood in by next week. Here are some of the components we already have stockpiled:
Joysticks
Buttons (fancy ones with LEDs!)
Input board (Xin-Mo AW211013)
Coin acceptor (mostly for the looks, and maybe to earn some money on the way)
Computer capable of running our game
And, like said before, we still miss a few important things:
– Wood for the cabinet
– Glass panes
– Stickers with Alpha design
– Big enough monitor (Most likely just a LCD)
The computer we plan on using inside the arcade is nothing special. It has an Intel core2 duo processor, an ATI Radeon Hd4650 graphics card and some old components we had laying around. That should be enough for just running arcade games and our Alpha game.
In conclusion, we have most of our parts together for assembling the arcade cabinet. If we get the wood here next week we should be able to get started right away! We’ll be sure to post pictures of the assembly in a future blog post!
Tell us what game you want to see on our arcade cabinet, or just any thoughts you have about arcade cabinets: Get in contact