Arcade Cabinet

Arcade Cabinet Adventure

I recently picked up one of those cheap Pac-Man machines at Wal-Mart with the intention of modding it to run the 60-in-1 arcade board. Unfortunately, it had a different monitor setup that made it impossible to work with the monitor adapter boards that are out there.

Enter the Cabinet

I decided to go with one of those wooden cabinets they sell on Amazon. I got the LVL23v from LEP1 Customs.

Assembly

There exists out there an “assembly guide”. It was easy enough to find due to a large QR code on the box that took me right to the “instructions”. The instructions are definitely not like those you might find on an IKEA product. Buyers that rely on visual cues will find them sorely lacking. However, if you read through the instructions enough, you’ll eventually be able to put together at least an adequate mental model. Then, once you start dry fitting the parts into place, it all starts to make perfect sense. So my advice is to grab one of these and stick to it. All I had to do was go to Lowes and pick up some wood glue. That’s all that I needed for assembly, a bottle of wood glue, and a screwdriver. I use the Craftsman 4v cordless screwdriver

I assembled the glue-in pieces last night so they’d be ready for the build today. After a night of curing, the pieces were ready to accept screws. Once you start screwing the pieces together, it becomes clear that you’re not going to get a precision fit if you aren’t extremely talented at woodwork. Because I’m not extremely talented at woodwork, my cabinet looks a little wonky, but it fit together well enough, so I’m not worried.

Buttons and Joystick

I purchased a button and joystick kit and got started installing the joystick. I didn’t have the necessary nuts and bolts to fit it, so I made my second trip to Lowes to pick those up. I then completed the installation of the joystick and got started on the buttons. The kit I bought only has three action buttons, with player 1 and player 2 start buttons. The buttons were easy to install. That is, until I got to the player 1 start and the player 2 start. It turns out that those button holes are intended for a 23mm button, which is smaller than the 30mm action buttons. I had to buy two switches, a Player 1 Start and a Player 2 Start. Though, it didn’t occur to me that these buttons may not be the right size, either. I had to send a question to Arcade Shop.

In come the electronics

Next, I had to install the 60-in-1 arcade board. I plugged in the Jamma harness and de-tangled the wires. Then, I began the grinding task of identifying the correct wires to use and following them down the harness to their end. The harness has zip ties holding sections of related wires, so that makes it easy. However, the player 1 wires are the same color as the player 2 wires, they’re just on a separate harness leg. I began to wire the joystick. I had to move the joystick up and down; side to side to figure out which of the toggle switches triggered the correct behavior in the system.

The buttons weren’t a challenge to wire, I just plugged in their associated wire. I used the daisy chained common wire to move from one wire to the next.

Monitor woes

The LVL23V is designed to work with monitors up to 23". I have a monitor of that size, so I planned to use that one. However, once I got it fitted on the cabinets VESA backboard, I noticed that the wood of the back board covers up the power and VGA ports. I guess I will have to either cut the board up, or get a new monitor with connections on the bottom, not the back.

I found an affordable 22" monitor, but I’ve exhausted my budget for the next month.

I have a small monitor that I use as a little side window on my workstation, so I hooked that up to the arcade board to get it configured.

Finishing up

Once I got all of that into place, I folded up the unused wires and bound them together with a zip tie. I added sheaths to the player 1 wire harness to make it look better. I added wire management features to hold the wires in place.

Wiring the speakers

I found a cheap pair of speakers in my “spare electronics” box. It had a USB connector and a 1/8" audio connector on it. I cut the USB wire, stripped back the two parts, and then added two crimp-on spade connectors. Then, I just added their wires to the existing 5v and GND terminals on the power supply. Then, all I had to do was plug the audio cord to the speaker output on the 60-in-1 card.

piggy-back wires