Video game cabinets

Status: complete

Each year, my employer allows folks in for trick-or-treat at Halloween.  Departments choose a theme (never scary, little kids visit, lame in my opinion) and decorate their area.  The theme chosen as the "best" by the HR department wins a pizza party for that team.  Our theme this year is "arcade" so the area will be decorated with visuals and characters from arcade games - classic games certainly, but the theme is broad and loose so skee-ball, pinball, and modern games will work their way in too.  For me, this was an excuse to build a couple of video game cabinets.

i started with an existing design, i wasn't crazy about the "look" but I liked the efficiency:  http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Super-Easy-Arcade-Machine-from-1-Sheet-of-Plywoo/

A small form-factor cabinet (like, kid-size) from a 4'x2' sheet of MDF.  I decided to scale it up to adult size on a 4'x8' sheet of MDF, and add a marquee on top because I felt it was important to the classic cabinet look.  I drew it in sketchup, fitting everything but the bezel and marquee bottom on a single MDF sheet.

Construction went pretty quickly, glue, brads, and screws hold it together.  Building it at the local makerspace (Port City Makerspace in Portsmouth, NH) meant I had access to the wood shop scrap bin for stringers and corner blocks.

A couple of coats of semi-gloss black paint has it looking pretty good.

The business end of the cabinet, the electronics, will be handled as follows:

• An OUYA console for the brain.  Not the most traditional choice, but it allows quick-play games in HD, in fact, that's exactly what the console was designed for.  HD displays are easy to find compared to 4:3 CRT displays and easier to work with, and they look good (except for old school games).  MAME4Droid means I can also go retro if I want to, at a later date
• A borrowed work display - a 24" widescreen desktop display
• An HDMI to VGA converter cable with audio line-out, about $6 on Amazon
• An X-Arcade Solo controller.  Some people say it's not the most reactive for competitive play.  But it has a quality stick, a pile of buttons, it's heavy-duty, has USB, PS2, and Serial interfaces and works natively with the OUYA.  It also cost $65, which is (at most) $20 more than the components would cost to build my own control panel.  This was a no-brainer for me.

I've tested all the components together, and they all play nice.

I have several weeks before they need to be done, and I'm about 90% done with the first cabinet, and about 60% done with a second.  Tasks remaining:

• Fill holes and paint the second cabinet
• Make plexi front panels for the marquees, with backlights
• Rear-mount the displays
• Come up with a button label scheme that doesn't look like crap
• Choose family-friendly games for the Halloween event

Update 10/29/2014:
Well, that went well... pretty much everyone was impressed.  I think the cabinet finish could have been better, but this was intended as a low-budget, low-effort build from the start so I'm fine with that.  Here is a terrible photo in a dark room on an old iphone with a scratched lens: