[Glennzo] has a house with some odd interior design choices. The most glaring one is a living room/den complete with a green Jacuzzi hot tub straight out of the 1980s. The tub really didn’t fit with [Glennzo’s] plan to use the space as a bar and game room, so out came the Sawzall and demo hammer. The tub was in its own little alcove, possibly a converted closet. [Glennzo’s] turned the space into a restaurant style booth complete with a cocktail arcade table.
The fiberglass tub was relatively easy to cut up and remove. This left the wood framed tile tub surround. The surround was extended to become a booth seat. A bit of creative woodworking, some vinyl cushions, and the booth itself was ready. But what good is a booth without a table?
The cocktail table arcade machine is powered by a mini-tower running MAME. The monitor is an old 21″ LCD. The frame of the table is plywood and pine lumber, finished with stain and polyurethane. The illuminated buttons and interface came from an arcade control kit, which made wiring a snap. The table is topped off with a custom 3/8″ thick piece of glass.
The final product looks great and fits the room perfectly. Now [Glennzo] just needs a BarBot to finish off the perfect hacker and gamer paradise!
wow… that looks really nice. And considering what it was before this is a huge improvement for the room.
A job well done!
I’ve been contemplating something similar for a long time because I do not have enough floorspace for an upright arcade cabinet. But I’m curious to know if MAME supports the cocktail table setup and how?
I built a MAME cocktail cabinet about 15 years ago. It runs only vertically-oriented games, which MAME supports just fine. Some of the (relatively) newer games are a little sluggish on the Pentium-II 450MHz in my cabinet, but overall it’s great.