My Phoenix Cabinet

So on a tip from a buddy of mine I picked up an old arcade cabinet off of Craigslist Saturday. It's in pretty solid shape other than a couple of gouges and a busted out bottom corner. But for my purposes it will make a great MAME machine.

First priority is to vacuum the filth and bugs out and clean the sucker down. She needs love -- she hasn't had any in decades.

Click on the picture to see the extent of the damage

Notice there's quite a bit missing. No coin door, no marquee or bezel, no control panel. Obviously, no monitor either (which is great considering I plan to incorporate an LCD anyway.) But it is exactly what I was looking for... an empty cabinet to house MAME. And at $25 the price was right.

This is what she looked like in her prime

Loads of filth. That gray coloration on the

monitor platform is a thick layer of dust.

The top of the cabinet had more filth

than I've ever seen. Except for maybe Buttslammers 7.

That was really filthy.

The marquee light fixture is broken. The guy I bought it from suggested I pick up a new ballast and wire up the connector so it can plug into an outlet. I have an even better idea: for about ten bucks I can buy a brand new 18-inch fluorescent light fixture; they're cheap as hell these days.

The busted light fixture will have to come out,

and that little mono speaker too

Ideally I wanted a Sega/Gremlin cabinet (with the woodgrain sides, damn I loved me some Astro Blaster back in the day), but this Centuri cab really is the next best thing. After I get done with it I estimate I will have spent a total of around $350 which includes the cabinet itself, paint, hardware, new T-molding, coin door, decals, plexiglass bezel and marquee, marquee light, and a brand new 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor I plan to mount vertically inside. I already own an X-Arcade control panel and PC. The PC is an old gay Dell Optiplex running Windows XP. I don't think I'm going to be able to run HyperSpin on it (awesome front-end) but MAME 32 has always ran smoothly.

This is pretty much how I plan to

mount my X-Arcade controls

There's a lot to do before my ugly duckling turns into a swan. I'll post more on the project as it progresses...