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This project started back in February 2003 when I had the opportunity to purchase an aging arcade cabinet from a co-worker. I was told it

was a Super Mario Brothers standup that was still operable, but had seen better days. I purchased the cabinet, got it to my house and almost immediately

started tinkering with it.

When I first opened the back panel, I noticed the manual inside. It was entitled "Super Mario Brothers: PacMan upright conversion

instructions". I was amazed that someone had taken a wonderful PacMan game and not only changed it out for Super Mario Brothers, but had simple

spraypainted the cabinet black in the process.

The first step in my conversion was to actually get a custom joystick panel working and get a computer put in to run mame.

The Joysticks

Since both the original PacMan and Super Mario joypanels are made from a single bent piece of plate steel, I decided to replicate this for my

conversion. I bought 1/16th plate steel and a manual metal brake. After a day of bending, cutting and drilling with a friend of mine, I had a brand

spanking new, one of a kind joypanel. The layout is set for 8 buttons per player including the 3×3 setup for street fighter style games as well as the

extra button to accomodate Neo Geo games.

Next up was ordering parts. The joysticks are comprised of Ultimate Joysticks from HappControls (

href="http://www.happcontrols.com/joysticks/ultimate_joy.htm">link), Horizontal Microswitch Pushbuttons (

href="http://www.happcontrols.com/pushbuttons/5891xxl.htm">link), and a couple of USB Gamepads that supported 8 buttons per pad. Also purchased several

hundred feet of 24AWG solid core copper wire, project boxes and molex connectors from radioshack.

First up was getting out the PCB of the gamepads and wiring up the proper connections to run to the joysticks:

Then adding the molex connectors. The connectors were split up on purpose, to make the connections easy to understand for anyone else who may need

to reconnect the USB encoders. Both encoders have a 4 pin female molex connector which carries the 4 joystick directions (Up, Down, Left, Right) and a 9

pin molex that carries the 7 main buttons, start button and the common ground for everything.

One encoder also carries a second 4 pin molex, which has a male pinout, to be used to connect up to the Coin Door (player 1, 2 insert coins),

carrying three wires (Player1, Player2 and common ground).

Next up is the enclosures. I used two Radioshack project boxes. Using a dremel I created the cutouts and mounted everything nice and flush in the

boxes.

The original Computer and Monitor

With the encoders finished and tested, it was time to hook everything up.
The inital computer for the cabinet was a microATX nforce motherboard with a Duron 1.3ghz processor and 128mb of pc2100 memory with a 30gb

hard drive and a 52x cdrom drive.

With this much finished, I threw a 19" monitor into the original CRT monitor mount and got the system up and running for the first

time:

This is how the cabinet remained for about 6 months. Then phase 2 of the project started.

Painting the Cabinet

The obvious next step was to get the cabinet back to PacMan. The original artwork was sitting just beneath the black spraypaint, but unfortunately it could not be salvaged in the stripping process. Using a heat gun to remove most of the vinyl and then about a gallon of chemical stripper to get everything else down off the cabinet, I was able to get the surface ready to sand.

Then I broke out a belt sander I took off the rest of the remaining paint. Switched to a orbital palm sander to smooth out the surface, then hand sanded to 600 grit paper. Next using some commercial wood filler, I filled the majority of the drilled holes in the cabinet that were no longer being used, then sanded these back down to the surface.

Now the cabinet was ready for painting. However there were a couple of major problems. First and foremost is I couldnt get a paint chip large enough to color match to the original color. Second, the only matching color I could find was for a laquer (oil) paint.

After some research I learned that indeed the original paint was laquer, so I ordered a gallon of custom matched paint for the cabinet. Using a commercial paint sprayer I applied the paint, 5 coats total to the cabinet to ensure an even and beautiful paintjob throughout.

Though not pictured, the entire inside of the cabinet was painted as well, because the interior will be just as visible as the exterior.

I created a new back panel for the cabinet, due to water damage that had been done to the original MDF back panel. The new panel features a large acrylic inset window. This allows
people to see into the cabinet and take notice of the customizations inside.

New monitor and fabrication

Just after finishing the paint job, the 19″ trinitron pc monitor I had been previously using was dropped and shorted out. After doing some measuring on the cabinet I determined that I could fit a 21″ crt in the cabinet. However that would require refabrication of the steel mounting cage. I took the cage to a metal works shop in Greensboro, NC to have it expanded to the measurements I needed. They did an excellent job on the modifications and the cage still looks 100% original.

As a sidenote, because of the changes, ANY 21″ crt monitor can be used in this cabinet. Just remove the monitor from it’s plastic bezel and use the industry standard mounting holes along with the bolts provided with the cage. This provides a much cheaper and higher precision solution than using svga arcade monitors.

The monitor I used, a Compaq P1210 (Trinitron tube) has a built in USB hub that was remounted for easy access, and the OSD controls were mounted for easy access. Both units can be accessed through the front coin door.
Custom PC Setup

With most of the exterior work done, I turned my attention to the internals of the cabinet. The original PC was severely underpowered on newer games and it’s enclosure was unsuitable for the project. I decided to mount everything in a similar fashion to the original hardware. This meant everything being mounted to the right wall of the cabinet.

The specifications for the final PC are:

Athlon XP 1800+ with a 1U CoolJag heatsink, runs very quietly.
Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard
512mb of PC3500 Kreton Blitz DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb 8x AGP video
Realtek 802.11b PCI Wireless
52X Lite-On CDRW
4x Opto-Rite DVD-+RW -Both Wired for coin door access
120gb Western Digital SE 8mb cache 7200rpm hard drive
Enermax 350w PSU
Logitech MX Duo Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
2.1 Speakers plus subwoofer, volume control wired for coin door access
The power button was relocated to the original power button location, at the top left of the cabinet.

Everything was mounted using wood screws and PVC tubing to prevent any grounding or movement issues:

The finishing touch

Now the cabinet was functionally complete, but it was still missing the finishing touch, the original Artwork and T-Molding.

After some searching I found a company selling LICENSED, ORIGINAL vinyl side art and marquees. I ordered matched T-Molding as well.
It took several nervous hours to apply the vinyl side art, but it makes the cabinet absolutely stunning.

Now the system is complete right? Not even close.

I spent the next several months configuring Windows XP to act as an auto-launching, keyboard independent OS for use with the arcade.
The cabinet can not only play every emulated game out there, but it can also handle any PC game you can throw at it.

I also finally finished off the control panel with several coats of Gloss black, finishing the unit.