Poker cabinet conversion

[Gondar]

A friend of mine got some old poker cabinets cheap. So I grabbed one and got to work.

The old monitor hade severe burn in so it had to go. I used a 5:4 17" IPS (5ms). Picture is fantastic, it's just missing scanlines and a tinted plexi in front of it (to make it darker, it's on the lowest setting right now). All finish it this weekend for sure

For the moment I use a Raspberry Pi 2. It's configured so that player 1 start also function as button 1. This makes it possible to play games like Donkey Kong without any problems. I have about 30 games in the machine in total, less is more. It just didn't feel right to add more buttons to the control panel. The joystick and buttons are original leaf switches hooked to the Raspberry GPIO.

Insert coin is hooked up to the coin eject button on the left. The right coin eject is pause. There is a button not visible on the top that function as a "quit game" button.

All in all I'm happy with the result. As this is going to be a christmas present for my girlfriend that loves Pac-Man I think it will do the jobb just fine

 

[jassin000]

I've gota say, when I first see the title of this post, I'm thinking horrific looking project cab hacked together running MAME (aka another hackjob MAME cab I see them all the time).

Then I took a look at your pictures... Wow! The finished cab looks amazing, the art on the CP, marquee, etc. It has the look of a factory job, not a garage conversion. Excellent work!

My only criticism is naturally no CRT, but I get it... Tubes are getting harder to find in decent condition, and the price is going up from what I've seen in the past few years too.

One option you may not have considered is using a TV tube (you can get them for free on Craigslist) with a Soft15khz option (like ArcadeVGA)... I've used this setup myself, and while it's not super sharp like a real monitor, its damn close (I've even fooled a few people with it) it will also make natural/real scanlines.

 

[Gondar]

Thank you for the kind words

Yes. I thought about a real CRT, and I would have preferred that. But as you wrote, they're getting harder to find and prices are not even funny. Even if I would find a tube on Craigslist the shipping to Sweden would probably kill me :/. I have a few leads however, and if I get ahold of one I will switch the monitor to the real deal. It's generally much easier to find bigger tubes than small ones.

I'll probably going to switch the raspberry for a real arcade board in the future as well. I have made preparations so all cables/PSU have the right configuration, so it would be minimum amount of work.

I don't even know if we had any Pac-Man cabaret in Sweden. I have never seen one here. I showed my girlfriend pictures and asked which Pac-Man cabinet she thought looked best and then I had to use pictures and best guesses. I was lucky that my friend bought those poker machines that most probably was inspired from a Pac-Man cabaret since I don't have a clue about the real dimensions of the cabinet (I couldn't find any plans on the internet for the mini, only the full size one).