Scratch-built miniature arcade game replica

Samuel Seide made this charming little replica of an arcade machine for his son.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

The game actually comes in that button/joystick configuration which really confused me as well since no system has the buttons on the opposite side like that. If you wanted to take extra long on the build you could disassemble the controller completely, swap the button and joystick sides, and just put holes in the wood to place them all in. However I didn’t build it for a 20-40 year old who would notice the buttons are on the wrong side. I built it for a 7 year old boy who has no clue that old arcade games never would have had the buttons in that configuration. haha.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, there is a guy who made a tiny mame cabinet similiar to this using a tiny computer. You should check it out if you haven’t already. This is sort of the opposite of what I was doing though. I used mostly things I already had lying around, whereas he put quite a bit of money into his setup. Still really awesome.

http://hackaday.com/2009/09/04/mini-mame-cabinet/
Ian70

Dude, you rock.
robulus

OK that is sweeeet.

Two things:

1) Why are the joystick and buttons the wrong way around?

2) What’s with the landscape screen orientation?

Neat job though. I want one…
octopod

@6

awesome work.
KanedaJones

hm the guy I orignaly tried to reply to is gone (??) so now it looks like I’m over critiqueing the new #1. hmm.

I guess the guy disappeared for name dropping xboxes and ps3?

wieeerd.
Anonymous

Standing ovation! That is TOTALLY cool! I’m a 42-year-old grown kid, and this is the stuff I grew up with! I am going to have to build one of these. I think you did an awesome job on it. Who cares if it’s not exact. It’s a mini arcade machine! Going to dig up my plug-n-play mini TV console right now, and head to the hardware store for parts!

Thanks for sharing!

Carlton
nanner

he gets crafty points and daddy points but we have the same plug & play and play it on the big, giant tv screen. that’s just better.
normd

yeah I want one too.
KanedaJones

strangely enough there is a big love for older games, so even though you are not interested I am sure there are many drooling over this.

either ’cause of nostalgia or ’cause it is the old thing from before they were born..

its like a model T doesnt go as fast as a PT Cruiser. Still a market for the model T
robulus

@Carlton

Hey I didn’t mean to come across all whiny – its awesome. But I couldn’t play it properly with that button arrangement, which sucks. Swap the buttons and joystick around, and I could destroy all ‘yall hi scores, mofos!
Anonymous

Wow! that cabinet was really well made, this console if produced in series that way would be a great gift for children (and their daddies).
I would also add the coin-op feature, just like the originals, in fact turning them into coin(-op) pigs.
Anonymous

What make and brand of video game system was used here?

My first guess would have been to use a mini ITX PC board running a software emulator like MAME.

But it seems his solution was way cheaper. I would have hooked up the game module to AC power though, saving battery costs in the long run.
Anonymous

Hey this is sam seide, the guy in the video, just thought I’d say that I used this pacman plug-and-play game:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=11061008

I originally had the plug-and-play game hooked up to a 6v wall wart to not use batteries but right before finishing up the game, the wall wart died (go figure) so I quickly patched the batteries back in so I could still make my son’s birthday deadline. He’s been playing it quite a bit and the original batteries are still in it. It doesn’t seem to be much of a battery hog.