Portable Tabletop MAME Cabinet (Cabinet)

For painting, I recommend using a primer, then covering with a few coats of the chosen color. Here, I used a metallic silver for my tabletop MAME cabinet. For the exterior surfaces, such as the monitor cover and the joystick/pushbutton control panels, I highly recommend a clear coat on top. It makes things look very professional.

Here is a picture of the arcade cabinet, almost completed, without the screen cover.

With everything looking good, I used:

• 4 L-braces to attach the unit frame walls together, and 4 more to attach the housing floor (that the motherboard and power supply rest on) to the unit frame walls.

• I used locking latches to attach the control panels to the unit frame. This allowed me to unlock the panels from below and remove them if necessary.

At this point, you can screw down the motherboard, power supply, I-PAC and hard drive to the unit. I would recommend keeping the power supply near the unused side, as shown in the figure below. (I drilled another hold near the supply for airflow; you can probably come up with a better design for your MAME cabinet.) Note that was conservative with my estimates on motherboard and hard drive; the unit could probably hold a much bigger motherboard, and I didn't need to use a compact-flash for my hard drive. Maybe I'll swap it out later.

Wiring the joysticks and pushbuttons is a tedious task, so be sure to know what you're doing. I'd highly recommend checking out the Ultimarc web site for the extreme details, but here is the gist.

1. Run an 18 gauge wire from pin 5 of the I-PAC card. See Ultimarc for details. This will form the power supply to each of your controls.

2. This wire will run in serial to each control on a panel. I started with the topmost red pushbutton in the figure above, entering the power input of the three connectors and exiting on the passthrough connector (which always allows power to run through, no matter if the button is pushed or not). At this point, it travels directly to the power input of the next pushbutton and out the passthrough, and so on to each of the four joystick connectors in turn, and then to the Player 2 start button. Repeat the process for the other control panels. All in all, power needs to be connected to each of the pushbuttons, and each of the four connectors for the joysticks.

3. Run a wire from each of the remaining connectors of the pushbutton or joystick (the one that outputs power when the button is actually pressed or the joystick is moved) back to the screwhead connectors on the I-PAC.). Be sure to ground your connections as well.