Like any good geek, I began my research on the Internet. As expected, I found a deep and obsessive subculture: helpful and distracting information, dead links and cutting-edge forum posts, bad advice and brilliant insight.
After a few hours, I was lucky enough to stumble upon John St. Clair, author of the sadly out-of-print book Project Arcade: Build Your Own Arcade Machine. I managed to scrounge a copy from a local used bookstore, and it was an eye-opener, laying bare the innards of the classic arcade machine's hardware and software. I also discovered St. Clair's website, Arcadecontrols.com, whose forums would become my community and gestalt therapy group for the next 30 days.
That's because I had a deadline. In 30 days' time, my house would be full of gamers for an annual gathering known as Rabbitcon -- and I wanted to impress. More than that, I wanted to regress in the company of like-minded gamers. So I dove headfirst into Project Arcade, only to discover that more than half of what was in the book --only five years old -- was horribly outdated. Most of the links referenced, other than to the author's own website, were broken. Half the vendors seemed to be out of business. And the cutting-edge instructions for configuring Windows 98 just weren't going to be much help (a new version of the book is scheduled for release later this year).
Thankfully, it turns out that building an arcade machine had evolved, in recent years, from a soldering-iron project into a credit card project. "There's a lot more available off the shelf now," St. Clair explained. "Back in the day, we had to build our own spinners. We had to hack our own keyboard controls. A lot of people will still do everything themselves, but now they don't have to." They don't have to, because an entire cottage industry has sprung up to support guys just like me, who are building arcade machines in their basements.
As I began exploring the bewildering array of options available to me from this cottage industry, I made a list of questions that I needed to answer before I spent a dime on the project:
1) What games do I want to play? And which ones are most important?
2) How much money am I willing to spend?
3) How much time, effort, and space am I willing to allocate to the project?
The last two questions were easy. I gave myself a budget of $1,000, I knew I had 30 days for the project (mostly weekends and evenings), and I had a spot in the basement already picked out. But what would it look like? I quickly came up with a short list of experiences I wanted to recreate.
Tempest, with a real spinner. Two-player Marble Madness. Four-player X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Simpsons. Analog classics like Sinistar, After Burner, and Star Wars. Spy Hunter and All Points Bulletin.
Unfortunately, this list included games that featured big landscape-mode monitors, vertical-mode vector games, four joysticks, a zillion buttons, two trackballs, foot pedals, a steering wheel, and a spinner. I soon discovered an entire website dedicated to the unplayable kitchen-sink control panels that result from just such thinking.
Screen
Screen size was the biggest issue. Many of the games I wanted to play used vertical screens (Tempest, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man... the list is long). But mounting a screen in that direction meant other games would just use a tiny central part of said screen. And what about screen type? Purists insist on using real 25" arcade monitors -- which are huge, heavy, require specialized videocards, and make vector games like Tempest a blurry mess. Buying a big LCD TV seemed a smart move.
In fact, I already had a 32-inch widescreen LCD TV in my office that I'd picked up off Amazon last year for $300. How would that work?
As it turns out, a 32-inch widescreen is perfect. Window-boxed, a normal 4:3 image is 26 inches -- the same size as a standard arcade monitor from a game like The Simpsons. With a vertical Tempest or Centipede screen in the middle, you get a virtual 19-inch screen, the same size as the originals. I would discover later that having a widescreen monitor meant that PC versions of games like Street Fighter IV looked amazing, and a handful of dual-screen arcade games (six-player brawlers, for the most part) became playable.
Controls
With that decision made, I knew how wide my cabinet would have to be to fit the TV: 33 inches wide. So what could I fit on the panel in order to avoid being featured on CrapMAME's Wall of Shame? At that point, I stumbled across the work of one "Doc," who had solved this "play everything" problem by building a control panel with modular pieces. His individual panels swapped in and out as needed, carefully made with dowels and fine tolerances (and lots and lots of Cat5 network cables).
This was clearly the solution. But, being realistic, I imagined replacing his precision carpentry approach with loads of Velcro. I would make a panel for everything I wanted, and just swap in what I needed from game to game.
