Arcade Machine

I’ve always been into classic gaming, and when I was younger I loved going to arcades. At some point during college I stumbled upon someone’s project to convert an arcade cabinet to be connected to a desktop computer running emulation software, which ignited my own interests. With some searching and some free time, I was able to find a Golden Tee cabinet with monitor problems that someone was giving away. I jumped at the opportunity, and a fully functional gaming arcade cabinet was the result.

The Cabinet

The cabinet started as a Golden Tee 2005 machine with monitor issues. The internals were replaced with a modern computer and a 24″ LCD monitor.

Specs:

• Processor: 3Ghz AMD Athlon 6000+
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• 250GB Hard Drive
• Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS (320MB)
• OS: Windows XP (You don’t see it though)
• Monitor: 24″ LCD
• Speakers: Creative 2.1 (Gotten at Wal Mart… surprisingly good quality/fit)

Control Panel

The control panel was completely rebuilt to be a 2 player game pad with a 4-way directional stick and 8 buttons per player. The coin slots are also operational (there’s a free-play button too; it’s just for show) Control panel image is from GameOnGrafix.

Software

• Frontend: AtomicFE
• Additional:
  • Joy2Key – for those pesky keyboard-only games
  • Some small custom utilities
• Emulators:
  • MAME
  • Project64
  • Gens
  • Stella
  • Zsnes
  • Dolphin
  • nullDc
  • VisualBoyAdvance
  • pcsx2
  • epsxe
  • Various Computer Games (Doom, Sonic Robo Blast, etc… hopefully Audiosurf)

The Pretty Pictures