Remember the days when you went to your local liquor store and dropped a quarter to play your favorite arcade game? Well, I remember. I dropped a whole lot of quarters. In fact, the liquor store made more money off that arcade machine than selling alcohol.
Over the holiday break I bought a mini-arcade cabinet on craigslist. It came complete with a joystick and buttons setup and monitor. The cab was built by hand by the guy who sold it. He is quite the carpenter as the cab is solid and can be easily be mistaken for a commerical-built arcade. As for the wiring… lets say he won’t be an electrical engineer anytime soon.
The system is equiped with a 10 inch CRT rackmount monitor, Competition Happ joystick (The ones they use in Street Fighter II arcades), and a Street Fighter six-button layout with three additional buttons for other purposes.
Since purchasing the cab I had replace the rear fan, some internal wiring, and the rediculous out-dated computer that came with the cab.
Update: I also posted a video review version. You can go HERE to see it in action.
This is the rear of the cab. I had pull out the rear panel and yanked out the old computer.
This is the front. There is a cab door that opens out to access your computer when needed. You can see the hack-job wiring.
This is the fan, wires, and the computer that came with the system.
I replaced the fan with a CoolerMaster Chasis fan that uses a molex connecter rather than twisting frayed copper wires to one of the PSU’s wires. And I also replaced the aging old PIII 400mhz system with a Dell 2.4Ghz Pentium 4.
The Dell system was bigger than expected. I had to squeeze it in to fit.
Here’s how it looks. A nice compact arcade system ready to play thousands of videos games.