Building my IKEA cab, a story of pain....

Ron DMC

Prompted by this thread, and this beautiful hack, I'm tempted to build a combination of the two.
Ideas are starting to develop, must sketch something together later.

CiDeRmAn

Finished it!
Well, pretty much.

Cocked up a few times, not for mentioning here, but make sure you know which board is the bottom and which is the top, it turns out they are not the same!

Runs a little hot too, but may get a fan somewhere.
The bezel needs to be done again too, but thats no problem
Also have to mount the power switch cable and find somewhere to tuck the PSU, and then I'm completely done.

Pretty cool now though!
The assembly and adjustments took about 3 hours, but it looks really nice and plays a mean game of Pacman!

Joystick fits nicely in the drawer as well, may make some sort of mount for it, can't really be played with in situ, needs to be taken out, have to integrate some sort of stand into the drawer itself.

I will post photos later!

CiDeRmAn

The better half has yet to see it, but she maintains it shall not be living in the living room, no where else to put it, I am loath to put it upstairs, feck it anyways!
Why does she have to hate videogames so so much?
Retr0, you're a lucky lucky man!

o1s1n

But it's just a coffee table!

CiDeRmAn

You could say it was a Flat Pac'd Coffee Table, Boom Boom!

weeder

lol replace the glass with a black bit and tell her its just a coffee table and then when she goes out swap the glasses back and tell her it was always that way

CiDeRmAn

Did I ever mention that my wife is in fact the cleverest person I know, and I know at least a few very clever people?
Something like the "Ikea Cab Cardboard Bezel Swap Trick", as it is surely known, would not confuse her in the least.
Her hatred of all things video gamey would instantly see through such deception, it did every other time I tried to sneak something substantial into the house, needless to say the Steel Battalion incident took some counselling to get past....

weeder

how does the c600 handle mame? ive got 2 pc's here that could be used in my cab, one is an duron 1GHz with only 128Mb ram (should get another stick of that for **** all), fan is pretty loud,
other is a dell dimension somthing or other with a 2.3GHz celeron and half a gig of ram, probabaly ata133, problem is the cooling hud is pretty huge cos its a big(but silent) fan, im leaning towards the dell as somthing should be made to fit BUT, I like ot keep a decent legacy pc around for troubleshooting and such but the duron system would have no problem doing that stuff either.


edit: just checked on ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.ie/512MB-SDRAM-modul-PC133-133MHz-CL3-/270690199852?pt=UK_Computing_ComputerComponents_MemoryRAM_JN&hash=item3f0664a92c

CiDeRmAn

Here's the cab nearly done,
Just have to pop the bezel on, then the glass....



Here's the ugly underside, including a look at my support solution for getting the Laptop to stay in place but not take up too much room beneath..
Cable Ties and Staples!
I.
Am.
A.
Genius.
(I did of course clip all the extra little bits, so no snags on anything...



And here it is, an unassuming coffee table till....
BOOM!
There's a display there!



And now the business end,
I am planning to disassemble the controller and spray it black, don't like the Tekken graphic, only thing that really jars..


And thats almost that.
I have a few things left to do.
i) I have to upload some more cab scans so the front end doesn't seem quite so patchy.

ii) I have to install a USB fan to keep it all cool, at the mo the laptop is generating a shed load of heat and the normal fan is well knackered.

iii)I have to redo the bezel, not too hard as it's only card but must get it just right.
I may, eventually, mask off the desired area and spray the underside black.

And that's that.
I have to say, I'd love to do a horizontally orientated one, and still keep the game list relatively small, but have all the classics once again.
Not sure if it'd be worth finding my nethers floating in a jar of formaldehyde the morning after though, of course she'd have to give them back to me before she can cut them off!

CiDeRmAn

It works fine to be honest.
The only thing is that none of the games I'm playing are really pushing it at all.
If I had an up to date romset and was going for the more recent games then I'd say I'd be in trouble.
Plus a few other things that spring to mind.
The 256mb of ram and the 800mhz processor is a bit slow for anything but the most rudimentary front end, if you want Hyperspin bells and whistles you need something more powerful.
The lack of umph also means that things load that bit slower.
Ditto the use of my c600 of XP, the whole thing would run better with a fresh install of Win98, although I switched off a ton of crap I'd never use in the config.
The monitor in a more recent Laptop would have a better viewing angle and contrast, not to mention less ghosting and the like.
But then there's no point in anything other than a 4:3 ratio, just be wasted in most arcade games anyways.
Plus the fact that the laptop has to squeeze into a fairly tight space under there, so keep that in mind.

My wireless stick solution is really paying off, certainly a lot less bother for me and it's a Hori stick, so happy days.

purplec

I have many a project running at the moment but I look at this and it keeps screaming VIRTUAL PIN.

And maybe some shmups action with a lockable spring loaded I player 3 but to control hidden in the drawer.

Mt 2 cents, looks well.

weeder

very nice, the monitor i tracked down for my bartop is a widescreen. ideas of a vertical going around in my head but im a mostly horizontal guy

CiDeRmAn

Oh, bought a pack of blu-tack and some velcro gripper pads, used the former with some little black cable ties to tidy up the, well, the cables, power switch cable, PSU cable.
I used the latter, and it's perfect as it is designed to hold heavier weights, to hold the PSU neatly to the inside of the cab,
Perfeck!

weeder

feck it, ill go with the beefier dell, im sure ill come accross another free one before long and if i need to get into an IDE disk ill buy a usb adaptor.

Optimus Prime

where did you get those clip things that are holding the cable ties in the wood?

o1s1n

Ah man! That looks the business! Well done!

CiDeRmAn

keithgeo wrote: »

where did you get those clip things that are holding the cable ties in the wood?

That's just a black and decker staple gun, you'll pick up a non branded one in a hardware shop for less than a tenner I'd say, gets sturdy staples deep into the wood, holding down the ties, and the cable ties act like a bit of a hammock for your laptop, you can adjust it and they don't appreciably make the thing much thicker, so you don't lose too much drawer space.
If you are building a dedicated control set that will reside on top of the table, then this is not a worry, although cutting the glass to size might be.

I didn't want the bother of building a proper support for the laptop out of rigid materials, I'm sure it has it's advantages and would be sure a lot more elegant than my solution.

Oasis678

well done that looks really cool. reckon u could make a few quid if you were to make a few of them!

pdbhp

Damn it Ciderman first you get me addicted to Wonderswan now I'm feeling the urge to make me one of them cabs real bad and I know the missus will kill me stone dead as I just got the go ahead to buy a Wonderswan, should have broched the subject of the arcade cab first and snuck the WS in under the radar.........oh well!:pac:

weeder

ah you poor poor newbs, buy your wife a coffee table. a week later a monitor appears in it, another angle you could take is, build your wife a ramvik jukebox

CiDeRmAn

She's home now and has yet to venture into the living room, it is only a matter of time before the hammer drops.....

On a brighter note, there could be a Ikea Mame cab going up on Adverts in the near future!

djrlittleton

great job so nice to see old hardware being used, fair play

CiDeRmAn

Well that could've gone better!
Ah well, I'm sure the Bachelors Arms hotel allow arcade machines....

Who knows, it may grow on her...

jimi_t2

Pulled down C600 and it ain't looking great. Getting those coloured vertical bands down the screen, pushing or holding the facia in at certain angles fixes it but its obviously not ideal. I've a nice little Fujitsu Amilio P4 laptop which I might gut instead.

Anyone know where to get a small quantity of wood/MDF cut from a CAD file in Dublin? Might go for a bartop altogether.

Also, a *NIX live CD with MAME frontend and USB HID drivers for pads? Does such a thing exist cause I can't really find one. I think this

http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html

is as close as I can get. I'll try it sometime this week with my USB pads and see if there's any luck

Jack burton

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Well that could've gone better!
Ah well, I'm sure the Bachelors Arms hotel allow arcade machines....

Who knows, it may grow on her...

Can women grow arcade cabs?!

We'll be sorted then, just hire a load of women and shove them full of jamma boards and..........wait I'll stop before I get banned

sham69

looks great, well done.
I have been planning on making one of these for the past 6 months and have all the parts bought and a laptop to use.
I think I will go with the french one that has the controls at the end of the glass rather than in the drawer.
I know it takes the coffee table look away but I don't fancy opening the drawer etc.

you have inspired me though to get moving on it again.
Cheers.

CiDeRmAn

Glad to see my efforts have inspired a few people.
Believe me if I can build it anyone can.
The only real expert help I had was my carpenter brother who cut the hole for the laptop, and I could have done that myself.

The thing that took the most time was straightening out the romset, coming up with a concise romlist that would be manageable.
Also, setting up the front end was a real pain, in the end I went with Mala but what ever you decide to use, make sure there's plenty of forums that deal with the real world problems they all have,
Hyperspin looks really pretty but is a resource hog and doesn't have a vertical orientation for the GUI, that really is annoying.

Thats that really, I have enjoyed putting it all together, and the finished article is really nice.

Even the better half is somewhat impressed and asked if I would produce a few of them and sell them how much would I get.
I don't know....
What do you think an Ikea mame cab is worth?
If I was to build them I'd have to come up with a better, more reliable engine that a 10 year old laptop!

o1s1n

How much was the total build cost?

And remember, you wouldn't be allowed to sell them with the roms. The copywrite police would be on to you :pac:

weeder

theres a few legal roms he could stick on it.

Myrddin

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

The only real expert help I had was my carpenter brother

Quoted for Kerbdog.