Just a few numbers from the experience:

• Time of arrival at Best Buy - 8:30 pm Sunday, November 23rd
• Amount of money spent at Best Buy – $8.65
• Time spent browsing in the store – 20 minutes
• Number of people in line when I got in the “Store Pick up” line – 2 (not counting myself)
• Number of people who cut in line while I was waiting - 1
• Number of people at the counter serving people - 1
• Time it took for me to get to the front of the line – 30 minutes
• Time it took for me to give the girl my name, and for her to find my item – approximately 2 minutes
• Time of departure from Best Buy – 9:25 pm

I waited in line for 30 minutes so I could get my $8 game, and I will not be going back.  Best Buy got a little bit of money from me and alienated me as a customer.

Compare that to the fact that I spent about $100 on Steam this week during which I was visiting with my family for Thanksgiving.  I didn’t have to wait in line, got what I as a customer consider some great deals, and was left feeling very happy.

My experience with Amazon this week was much like Steam.  Great buys and I’m happy about the whole experience.

Man I love the internet.

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I might describe it as “Diablo in space”.  You’ve got a randomly generated “Dungeon”, where it’s a series of solar systems connected by star gates.  You pick one of three ship classes, and you fly around, kill stuff, collect the loot, and upgrade your ship.  There’s even a bit of a storyline and a pretty well fleshed out universe.

The graphics might be considered a little simple, but if you can get over that there’s a really compelling game underneath.  Something that’s well worth the zero dollars you have to pay for it.  I highly recommend it.

I have a single tip for anyone who is getting tired of JRPGs, but would still like to get through Final Fantasy XIII:

Read the Datalog

I think there is a lot of storyline lost in translation.  Reading through the story recaps every once in a while will get you back on track.  Also note that the character biographies change as the story progresses.  It’ll put an exclamation mark next to the new stuff, though.  I essentially made it my goal to make all the exclamation marks go away.  It’s felt like storyline upkeep to me, almost.

Anyways, just wanted to mention that.  I approve of the game’s responsiveness, too.  All the previous Final Fantasies had too many black screens while things loaded.  Apparently all I needed was a menu that loaded in a reasonable amount of time…

Info About Rogue

• Rogue is a dungeon crawler game.  Your general goal is to collect gold and items and defeat monsters as you descend the floors of the Dungeon of Doom.  The ultimate goal was originally to find the Amulet of Yendor.
• Rogue was created in the early 80s.  Check out the wiki if you want to read about it.
• Rogue is turn-based, which is usually synonymous with slow in the gaming world.  With Rogue, though, once you are used to the keyboard commands it can play really fast.
• There are a ton of Rogue clones, termed “roguelike” games.  I built a timeline of the more famous ones here.
• You get one life.  When you die, you have to start from the beginning.
• Most roguelikes are free, and a lot of them are open source.

Tips

• Take your time.  Rogue is turn based.  You have as much time as you want to make your next move.
• Watch your health.  Run away if you are in a fight that isn’t looking good.

What To Play

I recommend playing the following games in the order presented.  Rogue by itself is a bit overwhelming for those who are used to Window interfaces, but the following list will get you started in familiar territory.

1. Desktop Dungeons (graphical, mouse only)

Desktop Dungeons is the first roguelike I played that held my attention for more than a few minutes.  It is very easy to play but it has a surprising amount of depth.  Note that it is still a work in progress.  Here’s why it’s a great introduction to Rogue:

• It’s all mouse controlled.
• A single game runs about 10 minutes.
• It’s got a graphical interface.
• You can only play the easier classes when you start. As you master them, harder ones will open up.

2. Rogue for iPhone (free, graphical/ASCII, touch-based) — [optional, but very useful]

This title is for iPhone, so it has a touch-based interface.  It has ASCII graphics in landscape mode, and graphics in portrait mode. What’s useful about it is the fact that the touch-based interface involves drawing “glyphs” in a 3×3 grid on the screen.  The glyphs are similar to the letter command that is commonly used on the keyboard.  It’s a great introduction to the keyboard commands, without forcing you to use a keyboard.

There is a nice help button that gets you into the list of commands pretty easily, so all the glyphs are pretty quick to pick up.

I also played Rogue Touch ($2.99) for iPhone, but it doesn’t help with keyboard commands so much.  It’s just for fun.

3. Castlevania Roguelike (free, graphical, keyboard only)

Castlevania Roguelike is an adaptation of Castlevania as a rogue game.  It’s graphical, and includes music and audio from Castlevania games.  Very cool if you’re a fan.  This is the first Roguelike on the list that is all keyboard commands, but the graphics and menus soften the learning curve a good bit.  You can press F1 to get a list of commands.

There are multiple classes in this game.  The easier ones to play are the Renegade and the Knight.  The trick to surviving is to take your time.  Most of the time I die because I played too fast and didn’t think.  It also helps to have a numpad so you can walk and jump diagonally without having to remap the keys.

4. Anything you want!

At this point you should be very familiar with the keyboard command for Roguelikes.  You should be able to pick-up-and-play just about any Roguelike out there.

Links

If you need help finding some Roguelike, here’s some links:

Roguebasin – a nice wiki for all things Rogue.  I found this list of faves useful.

My Rogue Timeline – Highlight some of the older, more famous Roguelikes.

Chaos Forge – home of Doom RL and some others.

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A Brief Timeline of Rogue Clones

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So I played that for a bit (I’m still working through the different classes, actually), and then I thought “Maybe Rogue is on the iPhone…”. Of course it is! In fact, there’s a free version called simply “Rogue” by Gandreas Software that’s pretty good, and Rogue Touch was $0.99 a few days ago so I picked that up, too. So far I’ve played Rogue Touch more, but I think it’s because I have some “I bought it so I better play it” guilt. The free Rogue has the classic ascii graphics, an interesting glyph-based (you draw commands on a 9×9 grid) interface, and it’s a bit faster to play. Rogue Touch seems a little bit easy compared to the Gandreas version, but maybe it’s just me.

Anyways, now that I’m finally playing it, I can understand why it was so hot when it came out. I’m also starting to understand why some people prefer the ascii version. It’s a lot faster, like vi compared to Word. I’ll probably gravitate in that direction once I get a better feel for it.

Goals

It’s important to figure out what emulators you want.  I had decided that I wanted the 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, as well as MAME.  I don’t have any analog controls, so anything requiring that was out of the question.  My primary goal was a cabinet that would play Donkey Kong, but I wanted the ability to play other things as well.  My final list of emulators was as follows:

• MAME – MameUI
• SNES – ZSNES
• NES – FCEUX
• Genesis / Megadrive – Kega Fusion
• Atari 2600 – Stella

Hurdles

I ran into a number of problems, but figured out hacks to solve them all.  The big problems I faced were:

1. Running emulators on a vertical monitor.  Mame is good about this, since a lot of classic games were designed for vertical monitors.  However, almost all the other emulators encounter a DirectDraw error when you try to go into fullscreen mode on a vertical monitor.  Whatever could the solution be?
2. Hiding menus. This is a result of not being able to run in full screen mode.  I wanted to make sure it wasn’t obvious I was using Windows.  This meant no title bars, no Windows sounds, no Windows boot stuff, and no Windows menus.
3. Doing everything from the arcade controller.  It was most helpful to have a shift key built into the controller I bought.  If you’re hacking a keyboard to make your controllers, keep in mind that a shift, control, or alt key could be very useful.  Barring that, key combinations can be used, but you’ll have to be sneaky since you’ll be pressing all kinds of buttons while you’re playing and you don’t want to accidentally run a script or something.  For my setup, all my hotkeys use the Shazam (shift) feature of the KeyWiz controller.  I have a magic Shazam key that is only used when hotkeying (see a photo here).
4. Quick startup.  I didn’t want to wait for my cabinet to boot every time I decided to play.  System standby is quick to shut down and quick to start up, but Windows doesn’t have any good built-in “do this when coming out of standby” functionality.  I found a solution for that, though.

Support Software

When all was said an done, I had installed the following software on my cabinet:

1. Atomic FE Ultimate – for my main menu.  Atomic FE is really quite slick, but a little touchy.  I tried to set it up from scratch, but ran into too many problems.  Luckily, LaDite over at the Atomic FE site has put together Atomic FE Ultimate, a pre-configured version of Atomic FE with everything you need to build out an arcade menu.
2. AutoHotKey - Simply the most awesome piece of software you can get for making magic happen at the press of a key.
3. DropBox - If you don’t know about it, get it immediately.  It takes a folder on your computer and syncs it with all your other computers.  I configured MAME to save screenshots in my DropBox folder.  I’ve been having a Kong-Off with a friend, and we email screenshots of our latest high score to each other.  DropBox is really useful for this since all I do is press the screenshot button and a screenshot is essentially sent to my other PC.
4. KeyWiz Uploader – for setting my arcade controller config.  I use the “B” configuration.
5. ATI Catalyst Configurator.  I use this to rotate my display in cases where I can’t do it with other software.  It gives you the ability to rotate using hotkeys, and this was very handy.  I used CTRL+ALT+[0,1,2] to rotate between landscape mode, facing 1st-player vertical, and facing 2nd-player vertical.  More on that below.

The Configuration

The first step is to get Atomic FE running.  Working with Atomic FE can take a little getting used to, so I ended up configuring a single emulator completely to learn about Atomic FEs idiosyncrasies, and then I configured the rest of my emulators.  I suggest starting with MAME since it doesn’t require any tweaks to get working.  It “just works”.  At least, compared to the rest of the emulators I used.

Configuring MAME

1. Run MameUI from windows.  Play around in the menus until is is configured such that when you run a game you can just play (no menu navigation required).  I had to set the following:
   1. Monitor rotation by 90 degrees.
   2. Automatically save state on exit (this also automatically loads it).
   3. screenshots saved to my DropBox folder.
   4. Cocktail mode dip-switches for two-player mode. I didn’t know about this until I started this project, but most older arcade games have a cocktail mode that will automatically rotate the display for the second player when it’s their turn.  You can set this in the dip-switches section of each game, accessible while you’re running the game.
   5. Configure a proper exit button.  I didn’t use escape because it is too generic (more on that later).  My MAME installation is configured to exit when I press F10, which happens to be the Shift-COIN button on my arcade controller.
2. Create a main menu in Atomic FE.  This is where I list each emulator.
3. Create a MAME option in the main menu you just created.  Selecting this option displays a list of MAME games on my system.  You can devise any arbitrary menu tree through Atomic FE, but I chose to go with a simple list of games for each emulator.  It’s easy enough to change later if needed.  I think a lot of people end up sorting by genre.
4. Make sure Atomic FE displays vertically, and your controller buttons are configured to step into and out of the Atomic FE menus.
5. Try it out. Play with it. Tweak til it’s perfect.

Dealing with Windows

After I got my MAME set up, I dug into hiding windows and working out how to put the system to sleep and have it start up Atomic FE when it woke up.  Hiding Windows is relatively easy, and there’s a very nice “Hiding Windows” document over at BYOACWiki.  Now that I’m thinking of it, this information might be useful over there.  Another time, I suppose.  Anyways, I went with the following tweaks to hide Windows, and it took me less than an hour to do it all:

1. Change the “Microsoft Windows” loading screen to a black image that says “Loading Arcade…” in retro text.
2. Hide the desktop so no icons are shown.
3. Turn off ALL sounds.  The windows startup sound was my specific issue, but I figured I’d shut everything off while I was in there.
4. Make the taskbar auto hide.
5. Configure Windows to automatically log in to my main user account.

Now for the hard part.  How do you get Atomic FE to automatically start up when the PC comes out of standby? AutoHotKey is the answer.  You can script ANY user actions with AutoHotKey.  The key, though, is that you can have it listen for a “coming out of standby” event.  AutoHotKey runs a master script when my system starts, and that listens for standby events.  When the PC comes out of standby, I do a few things:

1. WAIT a little bit.  I have my script wait 5 seconds before doing anything.  When the system comes out of stand by, it takes a bit for everything to settle down.  this was particularly problematic with the next item…
2. Write the key configuration to the KeyWiz controller.  If I didn’t have the 5 second wait, sometimes KeyWiz Uploader would choke.  Also, you might expect that the KeyWiz would be able to preserve its configuration through shutdown and standby, since the documentation indicates that this is possible.  In my experience, though, I wasn’t able to get it to save itself.  Instead, I have AutoHotKey run KeyWiz Uploader in silent mode (no menu is displayed) and it’s all the same to me.
3. Finally, start up Atomic FE, which DOES remember its configuration. All you have to do is run it.

The script that does this is here.  You’ll most definitely have to tweak it to get it to work with your system, but it’s a good starting point at least.  The actual script looks like this, though

OnMessage(0x218, "func_WM_POWERBROADCAST")

/*   http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic21697.html   Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/ralfw/archive/2003/09/09/26908.aspx*/

func_WM_POWERBROADCAST(wParam, lParam)

{

      ; wake up event

      If (lParam = 0 && wParam = 18)

      {

      Sleep, 5000      ; run keyWiz to write default key setup to arcade controller

      Run "C:\Program Files\KeyWiz Uploader3\KeyWiz_Uploader3.exe" /A /S /P B, C:\Program Files\KeyWiz Uploader3

      Sleep, 2000      Run "E:\AtomicFE_v020Ult\AtoMic.exe"

      }

      Return

}

I determined the  lParam = 0 && wParam = 18 part empirically on my system. You’ll note if you go to the link the my script that the original script watches for wParam = 8. This didn’t work on my system for some reason (I’m running Windows XP 32-bit… I dunno).
The script I linked to above includes the rest of my tricks, except for how I get all my emulators to run on a vertical monitor in full screen mode. Each one is different and I had to configure them all manually. All the emulators I’ve worked with restore their state when they load though, so once you’ve got it configured, it should stay that way.The only problem is that Atomic FE bugs out when the monitor is in vertical mode. If you run it when the monitor is in vertical mode, Atomic FE enters an infinite loop and all you get is a black screen. So you have to run Atomic FE in landscape mode, and then switch to vertical mode when you run your emulators (none of the ones I used had an video rotation feature. That would have been a better and easier solution).

I rotate my display by having Atomic FE run a batch script for each emulator instead of the actual emulator. In the main folder for each emulator I used, I create a file called “run.bat” that contained the command to rotate the monitor, the command to run that emulator (with command line arguments, as Atomic FE does), and after the emulator exits, a command to rotate the monitor back to landscape mode. For example, this is what my SNES script looks like:

@ECHO offE:\scripts\rotate1p.ahkcall zsnesw.exe %*E:\scripts\rotatenormal.ahkexit

The “@ECHO off” line makes the commands execute silently in the command line (where the .bat file gets run).  ”rotate1p.ahk” and rotatenormal.ahk” are scripts I wrote for AutoHotKey that handle rotating the display.  On my system, all those scripts do is send Ctrl+Alt+[0,1, or 2].  You can get them at the bottom in the master zip file.  The part that runs the emulator is the “call zsnesw.exe %*” line. “call” is used so the batch file waits for zsnesw.exe to finish executing before continuing, and the “%*” business is used to pass whatever parameters Atomic FE gives to zsnes. Finally, after everything is done, “exit” makes sure the command prompt window gets closed.

It’s pretty complicated and a bit goofy, but it gets the job done.

How to Exit Anything

Ok, so I’ve explained how to get Atomic FE to run things, but having the emulators exit is a bit of a different matter. Some of them can be closed with Alt+F4, some require you to use Escape, others require something completely different (like Stella… Ctrl+Q? Seriously?). My solution for dealing with that is one master hotkey defined in my main AutoHotKey script. In my script, F10 is the master hotkey (look for the “~F10::” line). I do a quick check of which processes are running, and that determines with keypress to send. Atari running? Send CTRL+Q. Other things besides MAME running? Send Alt+F4. MAME running? Don nothing and let the key pass through the script (I configured MAME and zsnes to close on F10).

The really cool part of the script is that I can also check if Atomic FE is running. If it isn’t running, the script will run it. If it IS running, and no other emulator is running, then the script will put the system to sleep. Pretty amazing stuff, and one of the many reasons AutoHotKey is so awesome.

In the end, the software all flows like the following state diagram:

Finishing Touches

So things can be run, things can be exited, and things can be played. But I ran into a couple errors here and there and added some hotkeys to my main script to handle them.

I added to my main AutoHotKey script the ability to trigger the KeyWiz command to write the arcade controller configuration. Once in a while KeyWiz fails to write the “B” configuration, and I’m left with an unconfigured arcade controller. It just so happens that the first three buttons of my controller are Alt+Ctrl+Space in this default mode. So I added a hotkey to my script that manually runs KeyWiz and uploads the “B” configuration when Ctrl+Alt+Space is pressed. The “B” configuration doesn’t use these keys, so it can only be run when the controller is in its default mode.

Additionally, I added two hotkeys that send Alt+Tab and Alt+Tab+Tab for any cases where Atomic FE starts up, but doesn’t have focus. This happened a lot while I was configuring it, but doesn’t seem to any more. I think it was because I had other things running while I was testing. If only Atomic FE is running, it always seems to get focus.

And that’s it! I’m sure I missed something, so feel free to comment here if you have questions (best for everyone), or email me at lukerymarz-at-gmail.com.

If you’re interested, you can grab all the AutoHotKey scripts and batch files I used here (50 KB).

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In Warlords, the gameplay is largely strategic, except for the fact that you don’t know which pieces are going to slide in when you make a match.  This was the only real flaw in the game for me.  I’d make a match, then a bunch of attack pieces would slide in and the computer would get a free strike on me.  The good news was that you could mitigate this frustration a bit by matching pieces in areas where there weren’t attack pieces.  As long as a full match wasn’t randomly inserted, you’d be ok.  A bit awkward, but the rest of the game was so good I could overlook this little flaw.

Galactrix goes with hexagonal pieces instead of square.  This make for more possible moves.  The problem is that the pieces can now come into the board from all sides.  With the board being so small, it amplifies the issue from Warlords.  If there are attack pieces on the board, chances are any move you make will result in a random attack piece coming in and the computer getting a free strike.  What interesting is the better you play (the longer your combos), the more random pieces slide in, and the more chance you have of giving the computer a free attack.

I played Galactrix for a few hours over the course of two days.  My final 10 games were against the same ship that kept winning because of random pieces.  After that, I quit and uninstalled it.  I really really really wanted to like it but based on the number of swear words that came out of my mouth, I wasn’t enjoying myself.

I’m still in on the next Puzzle Quest, though.  Hopefully they’ll come up with a way to remove the randomness so I can strategize a bit more.

I like that it came with an “All the Halo multiplayer stuff” disc, too.  I think that’ll probably just be the disc that sits in my Xbox if I’m not playing something else.  You never know when you’ll want a little Halo Multiplayer

I was inspired to make this cabinetafter watching a documentary called The King ofKong.  It’s about a guy’s attempt at beating the highscore record in Donkey Kong.  It made me try Donkey Kong onMAME, and snowballed into wanting a proper arcade cabinet to enjoyclassic games.  I was also in need of small table for a cornerin my apartment, and an arcade cabinet was the perfect fit.

The Plans

My cabinet is a modification of theplans from Kyle Lindstrom at Mike’sArcade.  If you’re planning a project like this, you mayhave come across it.  He’s got the most detailed plans for aMs. Pac-Man cabinet you could ask for.  Note that there aretwo sets of plans at Mike’s Arcade.  I followed the Ms. Pac-Manplans since they are much more thorough than the Pac-Man plans. That being said, I also read over the Pac-Man plans for moregeneral info.My changes to the Ms. Pac-Man plansare as follows:

1. I used 3/4″ thick birch plywood for everything.
2. My tabletop is 25″x37″ and 3/4″ thick, while the Ms. Pac-Man plans call for a tabletop that is 22″x32″ and 1″ thick.  I wanted something slightly larger, and I made some subtractions in other places that allowed for this increased size on the same 4′x8′ piece of plywood.  I used the same corner radii as the original.  This is item #10 in the plans.  Also, making the tabletop 3/4″ thick means I didn’t have to buy 1″ T-molding.
3. I wanted room for my legs under the table, and I have no need for a coin box, so I completely changed items 1 and 3 to 9″x20x1/4″ U-shaped pieces.  You can see the U-shaped piece in this photo:
   

   The U-shape is to allow you to run all the necessary wiring to the control panel.  It measures 3″x14″.

4. I wanted my table to be slightly taller, so I made item 2 30″ tall.
5. Since I removed a large part of the volume in shortening items 1 and 3, this forced me to use an LCD (what I had planned on).  Because of this, items 4 and 5 were not needed, as comprise the hinge for lifting the top of the cabinet, monitor included.  As such, I replaced items 4 and 5 with a duplicate of item 2.  This was a really useful simplification, and made construction of the box a lot simpler.
6. Item 6, the bottom is much different because of the change to allow leg room.  It is now 9″ from the top of the cabinet, meaning you have to route the groove for it in a different place on items 1 and 3.  I also adjusted item 6 to include the base of each control panel, resulting in a big plus sign:
   

   This piece is cut out of a rectangle measuring 30 1/2″ x 20 1/2″.  The 20 1/2″ width leaves room for a 1/4″ tongue joint.  I then cut a 3 1/8″x7″ rectangle out of each corner to create the two control panel bottoms.  The area for the control panel bottoms measures 7″x14″.

7. I contructed my control panels out of wood instead of buying pre-cut metal ones.  This allowed me to customize the layout to my own design, and I think it looks better.  More on that later.
8. The hinge for my tabletop is attached to to top itself, making for a bit easier fabrication.  This makes for a flip-top lid that is much easier to open up if you need to make an adjustment to the guts of the thing:
   

Tools

I didn’t have woodworking tools to start.  I bought a used  Ryobi One cordless kit including a drill and a circular saw, and bought a Ryobi One Router from Home Depot (note that Lowe’s doesn’t stock Ryobi).  I also bought a Milwaukee Router off Amazon when it was $108 as well as an edge guide for it for $30. I bought a 1 1/8″ hole-drilling bit from Amazon since I had trouble finding one at Lowe’s and Home Depot. I already had other things like screwdrivers, wire-strippers, pliers, a hammer, X-Acto knife for cutting the T-molding, etc.

Materials

With my adjustments to the plans the whole cabinet, including the top, was constructed from a single 4′x8′ piece of plywood.  I had the Home Depot guys cut it into three manageable pieces before taking it home since my hatchback can’t fit a 4′ wide piece of wood. So I didn’t need the 1″ MDF/T-Molding from the list in the Ms. Pac-Man plans, but everything else still applied.  I skimped on the following, though:

1. I didn’t buy anything to lock my tabletop down.
2. I didn’t need a coin door.
3. I didn’t buy control panels.  I made my own.

Speakers — I used some trashy dell speakers for mycabinet.  They sound better than I expected since they have alot of volume to resonate in.  I attached them just above thecontrol panels on each side of the cabinet, as you can see here:

The metal screen came straight off the speaker.  I cutit to fit with a pair of scissors, which are now a lot less sharp:).  Note that this is the player 1 side, and it has a volumecontrol.  The player 2 side does not have a volume control. From the inside, the player 1 side looks like this:

Buttons/Controls — Arcade buttons and joysticks all came from Groovy Game Gear.  They have Suzo-Happ buttons (which seem to be everyone’s favorite) for a lot less than the Suzo-Happ site.  They also have T-Molding and wiring supplies. For my controller, rather than soldering a keyboard, I bought a KeyWiz40-ST from here as well.  It made the whole controller-wiring process really easy, and I recommend some sort of controller over soldering (unless you love soldering).  I’d like to note that I didn’t have to do any troubleshooting with my controls with this thing.  I wired it up and it worked.  Pretty awesome if you ask me.


Plexiglass — I went to a place called Tap Plastics for the plexiglass top.  I had planned on ordering something online, but they have a store near my house so I stopped in to ask a few questions.  It turned out they could cut my 1/4″ plexiglass with the rounded corners (3.5″ radius) for about $60.  This was incredible considering some of the quotes I had gotten online.  They had it ready for me in about 5 minutes, too.  If you have a Tap Plastics near you, I highlyrecommend them.  They have a website, too, so you may be able to order from them online.


Leg Levelers — Leg levelers were a pain to find.  Home Depot and Lowe’s have a terrible selection, but I have a wood specialty store called Southern Lumber near me, and they had leg levelers.  Your mileage will vary in this case.  If there’s a Southern Lumber near you, I recommend it as well.  They have some really amazing wood to look at if you like that kind of stuff.


Monitor/Computer — I had an old computer from college, so that was a given.  The monitor took some time to pick since I needed really good viewing angles.  I settled on a Dell 2001fp, which can be bought on ebay for a little over $100.  It’s an S-IPS panel, which essentially means kick-ass viewing angles from ALL angles, not just the sides.  It’s 20″ and 4:3 (rather than 16:9 or 16:10), and it fits just about perfectly in the tabletop.  For games like Donkey Kong, a 4:3 display in vertical mode fits the game almost perfectly.  There’s more wasted space with a widescreen monitor for all games, so 4:3 was the way to go for me. Home Depot and Lowe’s are your friend for the rest of the supplies.  I bought plexiglass for my control panels there, as well as screws, wood glue, and other various necessities.

Contruction

Contruction was a bit ad hoc for me, but I suggest following the Ms. Pac-Man plans as closely as you can.  You’re basically making a box, and then adding some things to the sides. My control panels were custom, and all wood.  I made a prototype control panel to test my hole-drilling bit, and to get an idea for what kind of layout I wanted:

Once I had done that, I did 5control panel prototypes in Visio.  A single player controlpanel layout can be printed to-scale on an 11×17 piece of paper, soI created some life size layouts to put my hands on.  My finaldesign can be had here (PDF| VSD).  I printed it on an 11×17 sheet of paper and drilledguide holes through each of the button centers.  After doingthat, you can go at it with the hole-drilling bit.  I did thisfor both the wood and the 1/8″ plexiglass. Even unfinished thepanel looks nice.  Take note of the edge routing for theT-Molding.

Thefront face of the panel is connected with a tongue and groovejoint, which would come apart if I routed all the way around theside pieces.  So I had to route like this:

My T-molding doesn’t have a groove to fit into on the front face, but it is still held in place by the rest of the grooved edge.  I used an X-Acto knife to trim my T-molding.

The actual control panel is held up by the pieces of 1″ square dowel I’ve screwed into the side faces as well as a very deep route in the front face.  I also used 1″ square dowel to make the whole control box sit properly on the base.  In a perfect world, a nice joint would have been better, but this makes for a detachable control panel if I need to do some adjusting.

I then applied some finish.

The final product with plexiglass on top looks quite snazzy.

I then pounded the T-molding in.  I recommend a rubber malletfor this rather than a hammer, as a hammer can dent the T-molding abit.  It’s not terrible if you’re careful, though.  Oncethe T-molding was in, it started to look really good.

Then I mounted my leg levelers, which are useful for protecting yourfloor and making any minor height adjustments you need.

I saved the tabletop/monitor detailsfor last, since having a big piece of wood hinged to the top madethe whole thing a lot less easy to move around.  I cut a holefor my monitor after I finished the wood, but I recommend cutting thehole first.  I got excited and wanted to see some finishedwood.  If you cut the hole first you will have completelyfinished wood to work with.  As a result of my excitement, Ihad a few small chips in my tabletop that I had to cover up. Thehinge for my tabletop came from Home Depot, and was a 30″ longhinge that I cut-to-fit with a hacksaw.

I “mounted” the monitor by cutting a centering it on mytabletop, tracing it, and the cutting a hole for it with a jigsaw. It is held in place by some L-shaped metal pieces and woodthat came from the electrical section at Home Depot.  I usedthe same principal here as I did for the control panels; themonitor is resting on a makeshift shelf made from pieces screwedinto the larger structure of the box.

Electrical

The final bit was getting all the electrical stuff sorted.  I massacred the aluminum case my old computer was in.  I saved only the metal underneath the motherboard since it makes a nice platform for the mobo.  I didn’t have shears, so I just bent the aluminum until it broke off.  I’m pretty sure you can pretty easily crack your motherboard doing this (if it’s still attached), so I don’t recommend it.  The end result was this:

I rigged the power supply on theside of the box with some string.  It’s pretty wacky, but itworks .  I had some styrofoam handy, so I used that where Icould to protect against vibration noise a bit.

I had a 2.5″ drive handy, so I usedthat, and screwed it into the side of the box.  I also handcut some fan vents, one for in, one for out.  I routed theplywood out so I had the wood was thin and used an X-Acto knife anda hammer to cut out a nice pattern.

I had planned on doing this for thespeaker holes as well, but plywood of this quality can only take somuch hammering before it just shatters.  The fan holes looklike this from the inside:

The final piece was the controlpanels.  This is a lot simpler that one might expect.  Ibought a KeyWiz40-STfrom GrooveGameGear to make it easy on myself. Ground connections are daisy chained each button only has onewire going to the KeyWiz.  What I ended up with was a bundleof wires coming out of each control panel and going to the centerof the box where they are all connected to the KeyWiz.

After I had done that, I realizedthe need to make use of the Shazam! button (essentially a shiftbutton) on the KeyWiz for system functionality.  So I drilleda hold in the side of each control panel for a shift button, andran a standalone pair of wire from each of those.

I use this button extensively on thesoftware side of things.

After that I ran some power (which could be sorted out a bit better on the inside of the box) and I was done building!  I could probably sort out the power button for the computer in a better way, but my software solution circumvents it using system standby.  Plenty more photos of the whole process are available here.  I also took some photos of a Revenge of Doh cabinet for research purposes, and those are available here.

A write up on my software is comingsoon.

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