We’re pretty fond of home-built arcade cabinets, especially when those cabinets feature a giant HaD logo on the front. We teased you with a picture of two predators playing it at Maker Faire Kansas City, and we thought you might like to see what makes it tick.

[Dustin and Nick] have dubbed this the Dustin and Nick Arcade [DNA]. They built the cabinet from the ground up out of 5/8″ MDF, primed it, and painted it with exterior paint to ward off moisture damage. At the heart of this build is the bottom half of a laptop that suffered from a broken screen. The plexiglass overlay lets players view the guts of the thing, which we think is a nice touch that literally exemplifies Open Design.

So, what happens when you drop your proverbial coin? [Dustin and Nick] used an C# NES/SNES emulator that runs from the command line using a WPF interface. [Nick]’s software selects the appropriate emulator for the approximately 700 available games. You’ll find [Nick]’s code and a ton of build pics at [Dustin]’s site. No wonder they won a Maker of Merit ribbon!

Don’t have the space to build a full-scale cabinet? You could make a mini Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, but then you’d only have Ms. Pac-Man to play with. And we’re pretty sure she’s spoken for.