Ghetto Mame



A write up of the cabinet I call "Ghetto Mame". I call it such because the vast majority of the parts were either free or fairly inexpensive - not because I think the end product sucks.

The cabinet itself was constructed out of a 4'x8' sheet of 5/8" thick particle board - $8. My fisheyed friend with a crooked saw blade was able to get the cuts reasonably straight - we were aiming for the "box" design. In each corner of the box, we put a 2x2 beam that ran from the bottom of the cabinet to the top, that cost about $3 for a piece long enough to do all four corners. All the screws run through the particle board into the 2x2. My friend just happened to have a wooden monitor mounting frame for a 19" tube that just happened to fit inside the cabinet and rest on a couple support rails we made out of scrap.

The control panel box was also made out of the same sheet of particle board and ended up looking decent. For easy access (and sheer laziness) we didn't make a bottom for the panel. Went ahead and ordered some miniature Happs Universal 4/8-way joysticks - this was the most expensive purchase. Ran me about $45 for four sticks and shipping from some sap on Ebay. The buttons were leftovers from other control panels, most of them from games long gone.

I spent about $10 on semi-gloss satin black paint and brushes, and gave the cabinet about 4 coats of paint inside and out. I had a board cut out by another fisheyed friend that would cover the top and have a hole to view the monitor. Remember, black paint is very good at hiding crooked cuts!

The next step was to put some guts in it. I got "lucky" and found an old 19" RCA TV in a dumpster on a rainy day. From 1981, this had a solenoid driven channel selector (ka-chunk, ka-chunk)! After much treatment with a blow dryer and reseating of the wiring connectors, the TV was found to work perfectly and have a nice image.

The TV was hooked up to an old computer with a Voodoo 3500 in it ($35 for the video card). The problem with the TV was that it would only take an RF signal, so I had to patch the Voodoo through a VCR. Here's a picture of Donkey Kong running.



Here I was faced with a problem. The TV casing was way too big for my cabinet, so I had to strip the tube and the circuits out and remount them. This was an unbelieveable pain in the ass but a few hours later I was done. Here's a picture of the tube and circuits as seen from the side. I was very lucky as the PCB shelf from the TV just barely fit in the cabinet and I was able to dink around with the mounting brackets to get the tube into the wooden monitor frame. The channel selector is just haphazardly screwed to one of the 2x2s and set to channel 4 (as luck would have it, I'm less than a mile away from the rinky dink local channel 3 station and didn't feel like watching newcasts superimposed over my games!). There's also a PC power supply in there that was later removed.



And here's a photo of static showing that I managed to put that sucker back together correctly!



Alright, now we got a PC and a TV that can both be turned off and on with a power strip, what to do about modulating that composite signal into RF? Sure, I could go buy some off-the-shelf part, but I had to keep this cheap!

Well, another one of my friends heard about this project and "donated" a bunch of electronics he had picked up or been given over the years. Mainly, he just distracted me with his pinball machines while his son loaded dead 8-track players into the back of my truck. However, amongst all that treasure was an old JVC VCR! I'm talking early VHS here - top-loading, wired remote control, toggle switches, and gigantic. What was great was that you set everything with toggle switches - including the power button, TV/Video, and AUX input settings. So, run that Voodoo card to the VCR, set all the switches, plug it all into a power strip, and you are good to go.

Now I've got two more problems. First, I don't have a glass top for this machine. Through some act of arcade providence, I visit the same dumpster and there's picture frame laying on the ground next to it with a filthy piece of glass. What was even more amazing was that it was almost an exact size match to the top of my machine. There was about an inch chipped off of one corner of the glass, but I was able to make a mold with stiff tape and patch the corner with some epoxy.

I get the glass top mounted and it appears to be smooth sailing. Here's a photo of the machine going at this point (sans glass top).



I go ahead and order the "econo" model of the KeyWhiz keyboard encoder, and it costs me about about $40 for the encoder, shipping, wire nuts, and some wire. Nice little product, I was fairly pleased with it.

So now I've got everything wired and I'm playing this machine but this is where I run into my second problem - the damn thing is overheating! Taking the outer case off the PC and hoping the hot air would leak out was not enough! Luckily my friendly neighborhood state agency was surplusing a bunch of old computers, and I was able to pull some fans. A 3" intake fan (from a power supply) at the bottom of the cabinet, with a 1" fan (from a processor) blowing the air across the electronics to a 5" outtake fan (from a server rack) solved those problems quick. Grabbed some little freebie non-powered PC speakers, too.

Here's where the cocktail was at that point. There's a little sticker explaining how to select games, add credits, and return to the GameLauncher menu. The machine even passed the official "spilled beer" test with flying colors. (note: digital camera added some "scuffs" that weren't there)



Not bad but still doesn't look finished. I had printed out some artwork from those infamous PacMan stencils a couple years ago, and stumbled across a monitor bezel from a junked StarGate cabinet as I was going through my closet. And, of course, the obligatory MAME logo. Once I added those to my machine, it looked much better!


(note: Sharpies are very good for covering up the "scuffs" that are there!)


The Specs


Notes & Words of Wisdom



Comments? Shoot me a message at:

pinballjim at hotmail dot com


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