Sideboards are back from the miller and looking good. Please note that a full 6” have been trimmed off the upper lip.
You can’t stop progress!
Today I’ll be picking up my boards from the milling shop. Pics to come later today…
And by the day’s end the plexiglass had been cut, and the screen was just about ready to be mounted.
Today was The first day of construction. After my materials were cut…they started the day looking thusly…
T-molding. The heart and soul of any arcade cabinet. Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it plays an important…roll. Or role. What-have-you.
For those not in-the-know, T-molding is the plastic strip that hides the edges of your building material. It has a tongue that slides into the wood, so in cross-section T-molding looks, well, like the letter T.
Preparing your board for T-molding requires the use of a woodworking tool called a router. I don’t have one, nor do I know much about routers. I think they’re used to manage data networks or something.
In all seriousness, though, preparing your cabinet for t-molding requires the use of a specific router bit and settings. I don’t know enough about these things, so I’m hiring a carpenter.
One of the many tasks ahead of me is to wade through the 8000+ games supported by MAME and to weed out all the things I just don’t care about (mahjong games, slot machine games, games that just don’t work yet, etc).
MAME generates its vast list of all its games alphabetically. As the video above demonstrates, there are so many games in MAME that people have made ‘Top #’ lists of just one genre within just one letter of the total list!
So far, I’ve spent a number of hours over past months trying out every single game in MAME from A to Z and deciding whether or not each is worthy of inclusion in my cabinet. I’m somewhere in the Ms.
Title Screen
This blog is dedicated to a hobby shared by many, but discussed publicly by few. A hobby that, while sure to score you copious amounts of geek-cred, will decrease your likelihood of mating by several orders of magnitude. A hobby that can easily teeter towards obsession. Thats right, folks! We’re building our very own custom home arcade!
What drives grown adults to dedicate so much of our time, money, and effort towards what basically amounts to a fancy way to play relatively-primitive entertainment software? Perhaps we never gave up on a childhood fantasy: our very own arcade, that mystical device that can play any game imaginable. That machine that would make us the coolest kid on the block. The one that would make our enemies green with envy and even draw the attention of our crushes.
Perhaps we want to become the world’s best at something. At anything.
Or maybe the games of a bygone era remind us that often the simplest pleasures are the best.
With just a few PC components, a vast digital library of games from the mid-1970’s through the present, an old TV, some medium-density fiberboard, plexiglass, a prefabricated arcade control setup, lots of time, and a little piece of software called MAME, I’m starting down the road towards fulfilling my childhood dream. Maybe, if its your dream too, you’ll come along for the ride.
About me
One man's quest to live up to the lofty goals of his 5th-grade self.
