These battery operated video game boxes were popular years ago. You plugged them directly into your T.V. via RCA jacks. They typically offered a few of the most popular video games from the 80's and 90's, Pacman being the most often featured game.
This provided me with the heart of the arcade machine... the buttons, joystick and video game capabilities. I couldn't find any templates for small video game cabinets so I ended up just sketching out my own cabinet design on poster paper and building a paper mock-up. This allowed me to confirm the sizing prior to starting the cabinet build. It was important to confirm that the monitor and controls would fit comfortably. I used a small 3.5 watt component audio amplifier ($8) which i found online. This turned out to be way too much power. A 1/2 watt amplifier would have been fine. I used a 4 inch video screen I found on Amazon new for $19. I was able to find lots of video cabinet art on google images and I printed them out using sticker printer paper. I opted to replace the buttons that came with the joystick and instead bought coin-op cabinet buttons for $3 on ebay.
All in all this project was lots of fun and most people that see it want one. Unfortunately it takes more than 10 hours to build one and due to the copyright issues trying to sell something like this commercially would be problematic. I do think we'll see more of these types of mashups in the future. If I build another one I'll probably use Raspberry Pi and M.A.M.E which would allow me to run any video game through emulation, even the old Apple II arcade games I wrote years ago.
Here's a video of the finished project.
Very cool! Which games are available in your arcade?
ReplyDeleteThe games that were included in the particular joystick box I used were Pacman, DigDug, Galaxian, RallyX, Bosconian. There are other versions of these joystick boxes which offer up to 10 games and can be purchased used on ebay for under $20. I've got an old Nintendo 64 game machine which would be fun to use for another cabinet. Our family has a fondness for the Super Mario 64 video game having played it so much over the years so having this game in a small cabinet to play with occasionally would be a lot of fun.
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