Mike Fishcake

I like the idea, but it looks like he's not actually got a computer inside it Anyway, NOW I'm planning on rebuilding this from scratch. Got some ideas about how to completely custom build my own desk. Never done anything like it before, so it should be a challenge! I actually had a bunch of friends around last night who really liked what I'd done with it, and were greatly impressed with GameEx!

This has made me want to investigate PinballX even more

Hmm... first reply bombed out. Gah. Anyway... The black one is actually a cheapo generic USB controller "inspired" by the Playstation range. Considering it is a few years old, it's lasted quite well! The PS1 controller isn't too bad. It's 16-17 years old, but (despite some buttons appearing a bit spongy) all the buttons work as they should. Yes. I'm just working with what I've got already, but I would definitely prefer to use official Xbox 360 pads. I've not had any problems with the generics, but for the feel of the controller, it's 360 every time. BTW, here's that picture... Your aspect ratio may differ

*THREAD RESURRECTION* I had a similar issue. Installed the Asus monitoring utility to take a look at why my PC was being stupid and rebooting, then noticed GameEx wasn't starting fullscreen. TBH I just have GameEx in my startup folder, but I have a Space Invaders backdrop on Windows and one GameEx icon in the middle of it anyway, so I'm not massively bothered... although I might replace the Windows boot screen. After I've done another backup though

Hello everyone. I keep forgetting to upload that design, but I'll hopefully remember soon. Anyway, I've had a bit of 'fun' with this PC. It was occasionally crashing. Not enough to warrant "send it back immediately", but often enough for it to be a royal pain in the backside. I ran various diagnostic and stress tests on it, couldn't see what was wrong. A friend of mine did some investigation and found that the Cool'n'Quiet mode sometimes caused seemingly random reboots. If you're not familiar with Cool'n'Quiet (it was called something else in my BIOS but can't remember what) it's CPU/APU throttling; if your processor isn't under much load, it slows the clock down to save power. However, implementation of this can be a bit flaky. I turned off all CPU power saving settings, and it's not crashed or rebooted at all for a week now. So, that's general PC advice rather than GameEx / Emulation advice, but thought I'd share it anyway. Also, I bought a Playstation to USB converter from ebay for less than £2 delivered, which is one of the best bargains I think I've ever bought. Seems to work absolutely fine, plugged in and it worked straight away. (it was this one if anyone's interested)

Cheers! I forgot to post the HQ version last night though. Bah. Sadly I'm not, although you might find me stood outside shaking my fists angrily at a cloudy sky and screaming. It doesn't change the weather, but people leave me alone.

Some minor cosmetic updates... On Saturday, I created a "frame" to go around the screen to hide the bezel and the edge of the wood. I did it the "old fashioned" way by printing it off at home and cutting it out After cutting it out, I realised I'd not measured it properly, so had to re-do some bits and do some "creative cutting". In the photo, a couple of the pieces aren't quite aligned properly, but they're fine now Here's the design - I'll upload the source file in PNG24 format later so people can use it if they want On the functionality side, I managed to get PS1 emulation working great! A bit of fiddling around required but it seems smooth enough! Also, I managed to get the Amiga emulation working properly (when faffing about with it, I'd put "[ROMPATH/ROMFILE]" in the command line instead of "[ROMPATH]/[ROMFILE]") so choosing that now boots into Workbench with WHDLoad installed. I'd rather have it that way than accessing the games directly through GameEx. That's something where I do crave a little bit of authenticity ;-) BTW, are there any other Amiga fans here? I have an A1200 with the "new" (well, 2 years old but new compared to the Amiga) expansion card with SIXTY FOUR WHOLE MEGABYTES of RAM, plus a 4GB CF card converted into an IDE Hard Drive in it. Before I had emulation working properly, I used to prefer playing games on the computer itself, but now it's set up how I like it, I don't think I've actually used the Amiga for over a year!

Thanks for this - managed to get this working great

Hmmm... yes, there's something in that! Great idea! It'll be easily accessible, but hidden away when it's not in use! Thanks

Definitely planning on uploading a video, but I'll need to dig out my tripod first so I can have a nice & steady picture when doing the walkthrough. I was quite surprised with the level of interest I got from my Facebook friends about this. Obviously I was expecting the gamers to be interested, but even the non-techie ones were getting involved in the discussion. Give it a few months and I'll probably rebuild it just for the hell of it. I really, really, really like this one but I think I'll need a LOT more practise before I get anywhere near that!

So, with it being Ikea furniture, the insides appear to be held together with packed-together sawdust and optimism, meaning it was easy enough to use a hacksaw to cut out the middle bit, making a gap to fit the monitor in: After a bit of sanding and trimming down, the monitor fits! The edges are a bit rough, but I plan to cover them with some sort of bezel/frame: Here's a view of the Mini-ITX PC. Nice 'n' small (although upside down in this picture. duh.) And the obligatory "see what it looks like inside the table" shot. It was great to finally see it coming together Now, I started taking the front panels off the drawers to convert them into doors. The doors are a bit thick; I'm wondering if they're a bit too heavy for the hinges I've got on them, but meh... time will tell. They use a magnetic catch at the top to keep them shut. I used some of the wood that I'd taken from the middle to build up the stand for the bracket. I've seen a few people create their own support thing for the monitor, but I thought I'd buy a proper VESA bracket in this case. That's varnish on the bottom by the way, I'm not recreating a scene from Dexter. With the construction together pretty much how I want it for now, we created a hole on the underside near a door to fit the cables through. That way we can keep them nice and tidy when it's not in use. We sanded this down and added some varnish to it so there were no spiky bits. Seeing as it was together with no more sawing needed (yet!) we cleaned it up a bit and brought it into our living room to power it on. Hooray! And that's it as it stands now from a hardware perspective. Last night, I managed to get PC Engine emulation working with Mednafen. Took me ages to work out what the hell was wrong, but I managed to gleam some information from the stdout file and had to disable sound. Not bothered about that yet as I don't have speakers installed in it at the moment. GameEx was also bizarrely trying to open ZIP files, despite Mednafen working from the command line properly, but I just disabled the map file from the GameEx config page. I also swapped Snes9X for ZSNES too, which seems to perform a bit better. Started to set up Amiga emulation too, but I'm still trying to decide how to handle this. My Wii is softmodded, and I have WiiUAE set up to boot an ClassicWB Amiga Hard Disk image with loads of WHDLoad games installed on it. Simply can't be bothered farting around with ADF files. I was really impressed with WiiUAE in the fact that it picked up this keyboard without any intervention, enabling me to play Pinball Fantasies right from the start. So, I still need to decide whether to boot into Workbench or instead choose the games from the GameEx menu... Future plans? Well, there are a few scratches which need sorting out. There's about a 3cm scratch in the middle of the glass which is a bit annoying, but you don't notice it when playing games so I'm not *too* bothered about that. I need to do something with the top to make it look a bit tidier. My wife suggested a home-made bezel covering up the monitor frame, with a design based on the Donkey Kong ladders and the logs/crocodiles/cars from Frogger I'm still undecided whether I'm going to add a joystick. Yes, it's more authentic, BUT the Xbox 360 controller is IMHO the most perfect (yet reasonably priced) controller I've ever used, so like above, I'll probably get 2 wired 360 controllers and go with gameplay rather than authenticity. I need to keep an eye on the temperature. The PC hardly generates any heat with the fact that the AMD APU uses 25w it has an internal fan, and uses an SSD rather than hard disk. The monitor itself stays as cool as to be expected, but the monitor PSU gets quite hot. I might see what I can do about mounting a couple of 120mm fans inside if it looks like it might be a problem. That's it as it stands. Thoughts? Suggestions?

That was just to see if people were paying attention It's celery. I used it to scare ghosts. I'm not a stalker. The old couple down the road keep saying I am, but they're obviously not reading the letters I write to them three times a day. As far as the humour thing goes, I used to run a website called Team Fishcake a few years ago. It's not active any more, but our videos are still on YouTube (www.youtube.com/teamfishcake) Will do. I'll post a few more pics in a bit too when I'm on a proper computer. Thanks for the comments everyone

OK, here we go then! I've been looking around for an arcade based thing for a while. Seen a load of cabs for sale, but none of them are what I really wanted, apart from the ones by Surface Tension. However, they're eye-wateringly expensive, so that's way out. I love retro games. I was a sickeningly embarassing Amiga fanboy in the 90s, but I'm not really a "purist", in that I'm not too bothered about the authenticity of the hardware; I just like the games. That's why I was looking for something which didn't have the old arcade look about it. So I had a look around at other projects, and saw that a few people had hacked the Ikea Ramvik table. Found one on sale for £25 on Gumtree so it would have been rude to turn down that opportunity. Here it is. A few scratches, but what do you want for £25? Here's the kit I bought especially for it: Asus Socket AM1 Mini-ITX motherboardAMD Athlon 5150 APUPowercool Mini-ITX case4GB DDR3 RAM60GB Kingston SSDLG 24" IPS monitorAnd here are all the tools I used to put the PC together: I built the PC in, well, pretty much the way you build a normal PC. I used to repair PCs as a job about 6 years ago, and was pleasantly surprised with how little the concept had actually changed. All worked first time. I'll spare you the screenshots of that, installing, updating and configuring Windows 7 and GameEx, and just jump straight onto the first screenshot of a working GameEx with the Space Invaders HD theme! Stuck on a few games and downloaded some screenshots from the GameEx website: So, with the PC working, it was time to start on the woodwork. Caveat: Neither me nor my wife are anything even remotely resembling experienced DIY woodworkers. But we thought we'd have a go and see what happened Measured the monitor and marked it out on the surface of the table. I accounted for an extra bit at the bottom where the monitor buttons are in case I ever need to adjust it. Using sophisticated CAD technology, I painstakingly drafted up my blueprints: Then started cutting the hole out. A strange shape formed near the top left hole. I'm not sure where that came from: Here's the view from the side with the drawers taken out. The front of the drawers will be removed and turned into a door on a hinge. And here's a monitor shaped hole in the top: I'll post more later...

Hi, Just thought I'd pop in to say hi! I bought GameEx to do my first dedicated build, using an Ikea Ramvik coffee table as the cabinet, a custom built Mini-ITX PC, 24" monitor and Draco1962's Space Invaders HD theme. I like the idea of a "proper" cab, but wanted something which didn't look out of place in the living room. It's the first time I've done anything even remotely resembling DIY, and there are still a few rough edges to iron out internally and cosmetically, but the arcade table is functional at least. Well, mostly. I like to try to work stuff out for myself, but I might need to ask some advice on PC Engine and Neo Geo emulation Anyway, I've been posting updates on my project as it goes along on Facebook, but was wondering if anyone on here would be interested in seeing how I went along with the project?