Mini Racing Cabinet

July 6, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Here’s another small arcade cabinet. This time around it’s the racing simulator Daytona USA. [Pocket_lucho’s] cabinet work has been featured before and he did some fine work with the control interface on this build. The wheel is from the controller of an RC car and the gear lever from a heavily used toy. He fashioned two pedals using gate hinges and a couple of leaf switches. The guts pack quite a punch with a mini ITX motherboard running the show. This will look great next to Ms. Pac-Man. Check out the video after the break.

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Child-sized Cocktail Cabinets

May 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Sam Seide] dropped us a line about his new arcade creation. We loved his Punch-Out build that used a punch dummy as a game controller. This time around he’s made some mini-cocktail style MAME cabinets. He removed the screen from a netbook and placed it face-up underneath the acrylic bezel. There are controls on either side for two players as we would expect from any quality cocktail cabinet. The control panels are interfaced through the now familiar iPac boards and are a bit unfinished on the underside but that doesn’t decrease our need to see one of these on the coffee table at home. Check out demo and an outline of the parts inside after the break.

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Part Arcade, Part Guitar

April 28, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 11 Comments

Finally a guitar that all of the arcade gaming geeks can jam with. [Mike Davenport] sent us his 8bit arcade based guitar for his senior project. Details are a little sparse if you intend to build you own at the moment, but he does mention the basics: such as it uses an FPGA for logic and function, the strings and joystick modify pitch, it has selectable waves and other parameters, and even includes save banks! Check out a video of him playing street fighter rocking out after the break. Continue reading “Part Arcade, Part Guitar” →

The Mini-Markade

February 16, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

We love arcade games. Who doesn’t? We feel that the “arcade” feeling just can’t be replicated in any other form factor than an arcade cabinet. [Moslevin] must feel the same way too. He has built, what could possibly be the worlds smallest arcade cabinet. Aside from a coin mechanism, it is fully functional. It is an ATMega328p running his own custom software. The games he has available are Tetris, Invader, and Breakout, all coded by himself as well. We’ve seen small arcade cabinets before, but none this small.

Propeller Arcade

February 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This arcade cabinet has been saved from a gruesome death. [Oldbitcollector] picked the broken rig up for $50 and is building a Parallax Propeller based arcade machine. This began back in October and he’s just dropped in a newly painted control panel to replace the NES controller seen above. He pulled the replacement screen out of an old 19″ TV and found it to be a perfect fit. We didn’t find a complete list of available games but we know he’s got a menu system to choose the game and have seen Donkey Kong, Frogger, Defender, and at least one other in the videos. There’s less choices than a MAME cabinet but who needs more than a handful of the old 8-bit gems anyway?

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The Glass Recycling Game

October 17, 2009 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

bottle-bank-arcade

Operating under the premise that glass bottles were not being recycled as much as plastic or aluminum because there’s no payment for the effort, the team at The Fun Theory set out to add a non-monetary incentive. Here is the fruit of their efforts, the Bottle Bank Arcade. Now recycling glass bottles comes with a bit of a game.

A light flashes above one of the holes in the recycling bin and then rewards points if a bottle is inserted there quickly enough. This Simon says type concept proved incredibly popular in the video embedded after the break. We would image some of the kids in the video made their parents haul them home and back with some empties so they could play.

In one evening, this modified bottle bank was used over 100 times, while a nearby low-tech repository was used just twice. This is a great way to use some tech knowledge, a love of hacking, and desire to spread joy in order to make the neighborhood more fun and help increase the amount of trash that ends up being recycled. This is the same team that put together the musical subway steps, we hope they keep this trend going!

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Build Your Own Joystick

September 17, 2009 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

macgyver_joystick

What can you build with a ballpoint pen and some extra parts? [gzip] found himself with a bonus box of right angle switches and other miscellaneous parts and set out to build a joystick. Simple arcade joysticks use switches that are actuated by the movement of the stick and this design embraces the concept. The four tactile switches are mounted on protoboard facing each other with part of a ballpoint pen in the middle. When the pen is moved it presses against one or more switches to close, completing a circuit. For good measure he even incorporated a fire button into the top of the “stick”. Now we just need someone to make this work with a tiny Ms. Pac-Man emulator.