Ultimate MAME Cabinet Blogs
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
My New Cabinet
Here are some pics of my new cabinet in the build process. I've been working on it for about 30 hours now. I went with a 27/29" HDTV from Princeton Graphics. I will try to have the new dimension cut plans up and a whole web page with the new changes up when it is done. This one is going to be a little more expensive due to the $850 price tag of the monitor alone. Also, I got a new coin door and will be putting in a spinner and blinking lights for the player 1/2 start, since MAME will toggle the keyboard CAPSLOCK and SCROLLOCK lights on the keyboard when coins are entered. Since I went with the Hagstrom USB 36 key encoder with trackball support, I will be sticking with only a two player control board, but I've added a couple more 4-way joysticks (for games like Karate Champ) and one of them is a trigger joy (for games like tron). I'm trying to build my own spinner out of spare bath fan parts, but I need a large knurled aluminum knob...can't seem to find one anywhere.
As you can see from the pictures below, there are a couple changes I made from my original design. I made it wider for one, to fit the new HDTV. I also made the monitor slant a little more aggressive and then beefed up the top marquee portion to be thicker. The depth of the main cabinet is actually 2 inches LESS than the old design, but the control panel sticks out about 6-8 more inches. The marquee area is larger and a few other slight changes. The control panel is larger at 3-foot by 4-foot (too big, I think in retro-spect). Also, after looking at it in the current form for a couple days (right pic), I'm pretty certain I'm going to try to cut the angle of the control panel down about 1-2" on the front. I think I made the skirt on the control panel a little too high, and the width of that bad boy is a bit much...looks like a dang flying wing... But we'll see.
