Twiggy
02-01-2010, 06:37 PM
I was out on the front porch day dreaming when I remembered that I used to play Visual Pinball on my MAME cabinet, and wouldn't it be great if you could play full-screen pinball on a widescreen monitor turned sideways?
Then I realized that I'm usually not the first person in the world with these ideas, so I took to the web. Thankfully, I've found this community of tinkering gurus to help guide my initiation.
When I built my MAME cab, it was strictly no-wiring. I bought the controls pre-made and tore the heck out of an empty old Operation: WOLF cabinet to build it. Then I got married, and the cabinet ended up in the garage. So naturally when I shared my Pinball fantasy with my wife, she replied with, "And where is that going to go? Next to your pinball machine in the garage?" Admittedly yes, I have one of those too.
But my idea was to make a strictly table-top pinball cabinet, one that can even fold up and store in a closet or travel easily to parties. The challenge is that I want to do it all with stuff I've got lying around, and maybe a hundred bucks invested.
In a word, cheap.
Thankfully my 22" widescreen monitor and 17" older-than-sin 4:3 monitor line up beautifully, and I even got an equally nerdy buddy to donate some spare arcade buttons w/switches (I'll be getting a few more at our local arcade repair joint). I had an extra mid-range gaming computer that I used to take to LAN parties, so it's all coming together nicely. The controls are (thus far) a butchered original Xbox controller, though some of the keys have a mind of their own in the HyperPin FE, so that may be subject to change.
But having said all that, here's what I've managed so far. I spent six bucks on a delightfully awful pair of powered speakers and about twenty bucks on wood, which is waiting to be taken and cut at a buddy's house. The pictures below are my test build on an old wheeled hospital cart, which has proven awfully handy. The PC is still in the LAN cube case, but I plan to have a micro-ATX rack that slides out of the back while the back-panel monitor will fold flat against the playfield.
The best part? The wife recently asked, "When do I get to play?" Heheh. I think that's the smell of success wafting from around the corner!
Then I realized that I'm usually not the first person in the world with these ideas, so I took to the web. Thankfully, I've found this community of tinkering gurus to help guide my initiation.
When I built my MAME cab, it was strictly no-wiring. I bought the controls pre-made and tore the heck out of an empty old Operation: WOLF cabinet to build it. Then I got married, and the cabinet ended up in the garage. So naturally when I shared my Pinball fantasy with my wife, she replied with, "And where is that going to go? Next to your pinball machine in the garage?" Admittedly yes, I have one of those too.
But my idea was to make a strictly table-top pinball cabinet, one that can even fold up and store in a closet or travel easily to parties. The challenge is that I want to do it all with stuff I've got lying around, and maybe a hundred bucks invested.
In a word, cheap.
Thankfully my 22" widescreen monitor and 17" older-than-sin 4:3 monitor line up beautifully, and I even got an equally nerdy buddy to donate some spare arcade buttons w/switches (I'll be getting a few more at our local arcade repair joint). I had an extra mid-range gaming computer that I used to take to LAN parties, so it's all coming together nicely. The controls are (thus far) a butchered original Xbox controller, though some of the keys have a mind of their own in the HyperPin FE, so that may be subject to change.
But having said all that, here's what I've managed so far. I spent six bucks on a delightfully awful pair of powered speakers and about twenty bucks on wood, which is waiting to be taken and cut at a buddy's house. The pictures below are my test build on an old wheeled hospital cart, which has proven awfully handy. The PC is still in the LAN cube case, but I plan to have a micro-ATX rack that slides out of the back while the back-panel monitor will fold flat against the playfield.
The best part? The wife recently asked, "When do I get to play?" Heheh. I think that's the smell of success wafting from around the corner!