Over the last several months I have been obtaining various elements required to make this a reality. The ultimate goal was to do this as cheaply as possible and build it for under $500.Only time will tell how close I am to budget, but I know that similar machines we sell at work list for about four times as much.
The first step was to find a tutorial online that catered to someone such as myself with limited wood working skills. After scouring the web and watching countless builds on youtube I have found the right set of plans for my purposes on http://www.arcadecab.com. The site was particularly helpful and very well put together and ultimately I decided to model my cabinet around the original plans on this site.
The software end of things has come naturally as I have been interested in emulation for years and have played countless different emulators for most of the popular consoles out there. I think the hardest part has been paring down thousands of titles, weeding out the ones that don't work or are just unplayable for other reasons, and deciding which games will be included. I'm torn because a huge part of me is a purist that wants the 'true' arcade look and feel and wants to keep it solely for playing arcade games, but there's the whole 8bit region of my brain that is always seeking new ways to play my favorite NES games. I have enjoyed them on a front loader, a top loader, my Wii, my Ipod touch, even an old PDA, and if I could play them from a wristwatch I probably would.
When I mentioned that I had ambitions of building a system to play several of the old classics I was met with enthusiasm from one of my co-workers and so we decided to build two. We started out by buying our controllers and managed to get a very good deal on them. As luck would have it the site that makes the controllers, http://xarcade.com, was sold out and so we found one of their resellers. Doug (my partner in crime on this project) ended up picking up two controllers while on vacation and saved on shipping.
A few weeks after we bought the controllers we took a list to various hardware stores and picked up 4 sheets of MDF as well as other bits and pieces for our build. About the same time as we were gathering up our parts I was tweaking the front end we would use for our arcade and setting up the controller to make the functions from the keyboard that would be needed for our games. I had been testing on my laptop for awhile then moved to an old tower that we had replaced. Since the games I have planned to include do not require much processing power to run my old tower was a great fit and easy on the budget. At work we had recently marked down some PC speakers and so for under $20 I got a nice set of Phillips speakers with a volume control that can be mounted on the side of the cabinet. I also picked up a black 17" CRT monitor for free. At this point I have spent a total of about $220 dollars on the project and, as I mentioned earlier, today was the day that we got into the nuts and bolts of it.
With the stat holiday on Sunday I had an extra day off and so Doug and I were able to get together and build the base of our cabinets as well as cut the sides. We agonized over the cutting of the sides and spent most of our time on that today. One of the big take home disclaimers is that if we didn't get the cuts right our controller would not fit properly. That being said we took extra time to ensure that all would go well. The irony of this is that we decided to build it in an open carport and we had had such nice, mild weather up until today. Of all days, mother nature decided to send us some snow today so amid wind, snow and cooler temperatures then we've seen in months we set up saw horses, lights, portable heat and proceeded to make our cuts. After about 3 hours we had cut four sides for our two cabinets and completed which I think is probably the most time-consuming step.
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