Still busy reading up on the exact design I’m going to do and have come across a few useful sites worth mentioning.

• http://buildahomearcade.com/
• http://www.webbpickersgill.com/mame/
• http://www.got2getalife.com/arcade/index.html

A excel spreadsheet of all the items I’ve needed and where I purchased them.

Arcade Cabinet Bill of Materials

If you order the UltraStik you can also order the cable harness which will save you the trouble of building your own cables.

I’m going to build my own cable as its simple enough to do. You need a few crimp connectors and a header connector. The wiring should be easy enough to work out from here

Got the wood from Lumber City. Not badly priced at all. A 16mm x 1820 x 2750 piece costs R340

Also purchased 4 x castor wheels for the base from Brights for R35 each.

Received my buttons and joysticks from Ultimarc today. Very impressed with their service. Received the items from the UK via DHL in under a week! Thumbs up!

Bought a 74cm Sansui TV off Gumtree for R500. Perfect condition. Feel almost bad that I have to chop it up to use in the cabinet.

After reading up all about joysticks I decided to order the UltraStik from Ultimarc

These these joysticks don’t appear cheap, but the buttons connect to the joysticks which are then connected to the USB port on the PC thereby saving you from purchasing a I-Pac or a similair device. So for only a few extra Rand I decided to buy new rather than having hassles with old joysticks. These joysticks get awesome reviews as well so I”m sure it will be worth the extra.

I also purchased 16 x pushbuttons and 2 x Start Logo pushbuttons

I’ve only heard good things from Ultimarc so we’ll see what happens. Cost R1420 including shipping.

I was also looking at getting a coindoor from Happ but its way too expensive. $70 for the door and 50 pounds to ship to SA!!

I might try these local guys that do arcade repairs and see what they have to offer – maybe a good secondhand coin door?

After using mame on the PC for many years and seeing some great pics of arcade cabinets that people have built, I’ve finally decided to jump in and build my own arcade cabinet.

This post on a local Forum actually sparked my interest again and after seeing some of the awesome pics decided it was time to build one!

The internet is full with tons of info and plans on how to build your own cabinet. Some sites contain a lot of useful information, others are poorly written, and there are also a lot of sites that no longer exist.

I’m going to take you through all the steps I’m going use to build my own cabinet.

For starters get your hands on this book. Its will give you a good insight into building an arcade cabinet.

From a few posts I’ve read on building your own arcade, people reckon its almost as rewarding as playing the games 🙂

So far I’ve spent a lot of time just reading up on the topic and looking through stacks of sites. I’ll add in all the links I’ve used.