[COCKTAIL] Just thought I'd say hello!

[Mike Fishcake]

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?

[hansolo77]

Welcome aboard! I'm sure I speak for everybody here that you're going to absolutely love it here. Everybody here is really cool and helpful. Some of us have a quirky sense of humor though, so watch out for that!

As for your build. If it's functional, it works for me! I don't have anything at all. I just use my HDTV in my bedroom and play directly on that. Not the greatest, but again, it's functional and works for me! I think anything you do is great. I tried my hand at building an arcade stick. Turned out really REALLY bad, so I chucked it. In hindsight I wish I saved the parts so I could try again, but oh well.

Anyway, if you have any question and need help with anything, don't hesitate to ask! And above all else, enjoy your stay!

[tthurman]

Nice build you got there! Be sure and post you progress in the gamers rig section if it isn't too much of a bother. I love seeing pictures of the process, as do many others here.

Welcome to the GameEx community!

[Draco1962]

Welcome to the GameEx forums and would love to see details of your build! I moved your thread to the Gamer Rigs subforum so that others will find it easier going forward.

[Mike Fishcake]

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 motherboard
• AMD Athlon 5150 APU
• Powercool Mini-ITX case
• 4GB DDR3 RAM
• 60GB Kingston SSD
• LG 24" IPS monitor

And 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...

[tthurman]

Cool!

I gotta ask, what's the cheese slicer for, and were bloody mary's involved at some point too?

[stigzler]

Like it. Ashamedly I have to ask "what kind of vegetable is that?" Oh and what did you use it for?

[Tempest]

That would be celery. Specifically a stalk of celery. I'm thinking that Fishcake (Which happens to be my favorite king of cake) is subconsciously alerting us to the possibility that he might be a stalker.

I love the sense of humour in the photos. Mr. Fishcake will fit in well here.

[DazzleHP]

Teh "Ramvik" is perfect! And you found it on Gumtree - success! Liking this build a lot man! Do us a favor and post a vid when it's all done +1

[stigzler]

Ohhh!!! So that's what's in the middle of a 'bunch' of celery! I never get that far, as I'm normally exhausted expending more calories than I'm consuming.

Either that or the phone is far too close for pizza.

Put yer pizza and beer on the thing you're playing - like it

[Mike Fishcake]

Cool!

I gotta ask, what's the cheese slicer for, and were bloody mary's involved at some point too?

That was just to see if people were paying attention

Like it. Ashamedly I have to ask "what kind of vegetable is that?" Oh and what did you use it for?

It's celery. I used it to scare ghosts.

That would be celery. Specifically a stalk of celery. I'm thinking that Fishcake (Which happens to be my favorite king of cake) is subconsciously alerting us to the possibility that he might be a stalker.

I love the sense of humour in the photos. Mr. Fishcake will fit in well here.

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)

Teh "Ramvik" is perfect! And you found it on Gumtree - success! Liking this build a lot man! Do us a favor and post a vid when it's all done +1

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

[Mike Fishcake]

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?

[KRC]

@Mike FIshcake,

Good work on this buddy and good choice on the Space Invaders theme (I've not really seen this theme in action but it looks great, Nice one Draco)

Gumtree is a pretty good place to pick up stuff, but also a good opportunity for fraudsters

+1 to DazzleHP, Put a video up if you can

[Mike Fishcake]

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!

[Draco1962]

If you choose to stick with the Space Invaders HD theme, why not a Space Invaders bezel design?

[stigzler]

Gamepad or arcade controls? Both! Those table end are just asking to be converted. How about they fold down with the controls on the inside of the ends? Amazing for mame vert schmups!

[Mike Fishcake]

If you choose to stick with the Space Invaders HD theme, why not a Space Invaders bezel design?

Hmmm... yes, there's something in that!

Gamepad or arcade controls? Both! Those table end are just asking to be converted. How about they fold down with the controls on the inside of the ends? Amazing for mame vert schmups!

Great idea! It'll be easily accessible, but hidden away when it's not in use! Thanks

[tthurman]

Both! Those table end are just asking to be converted. How about they fold down with the controls on the inside of the ends? Amazing for mame vert schmups!

Yes, then you can stay busy keeping Dazzle off your system!

[stigzler]

Sanwa JLF

Maybe, just maybe possible

[Mike Fishcake]

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!

[Draco1962]

Very nice! I noticed Lemmings at the top. One of my faves! Well done!

[DazzleHP]

Very nice! I noticed Lemmings at the top. One of my faves! Well done!

likewise, best puzzler/strat of all time!

@MikeFish - nice job on the bezel, totally wouldn't know you printed it yourself!

BTW, are you a weatherman?!!!

[stigzler]

You're thinking of that other fella on here, Daz:

Ian McCaskill-er

Proper bezel, that

[Mike Fishcake]

Very nice! I noticed Lemmings at the top. One of my faves! Well done!

Cheers! I forgot to post the HQ version last night though. Bah.

likewise, best puzzler/strat of all time!

@MikeFish - nice job on the bezel, totally wouldn't know you printed it yourself!

BTW, are you a weatherman?!!!

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.

[KRC]

I used to have an Amiga 1200, My older bro gave it me in the early 90s, It came with loads of floppy's, I can remember games like Cannon Fodder and Mortal Kombat 2 with half a dozen floppy discs. Good Times, My all time favorite game on there was Manchester United Double, It was kinda like a football sim like Sensible Soccer.