[Jed] built a MAME cabinet into some flat pack furniture (translated). For the housing he chose an Ikea Ramvik side table. This is a perfect piece of furniture for the project for several reasons; it’s cheap, coming in at under $70, it’s a reasonable height to use while sitting on the sofa, it has a built-in drawer that will hide the guts of the system, and it was designed to use a piece of glass as the table surface.
The electronics are pretty straight forward. A notebook computer runs the MAME frontend, with an auxiliary screen which is framed nicely under the glass. Controls are standard coin-op type buttons soldered to the contacts on the PCB from a USB joystick. The brushed aluminum bezel added to the surface of the table keeps the modern finished look that one would want with a showpiece like this one.
We always like to keep our eyes open for hackable items when visiting Ikea. Make sure to check out their As-Is department (preferably as soon as they open) to find hackable furniture on the cheap.
Whoah, I like this. Excellent case work, that’s a fine price for a fine case. :) Having built a sit-down style MAME cabinet myself in high school I can attest to mine having been a lot more expensive.
What a cool idea, and he did such a good job too! It looks amazing
Yeah, nice build!
Also, the cabinet is officially a real hack. :)
The Ikea table is a great find. The only thing that concerns me is that arcade machines didn’t run on LCD screens, and apart from not looking right, the viewing angles on most of them are horrible, which means selecting the right one for a cocktail design more of a problem.
Hackable furniture. That is a pretty good term. You should start a wiki page on that. Definitely catchy. I have to say, this is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. Well done!
Jim