Happy's Arcade

Inspired by my son-in-law Mike and his full size virtual pinball machine I have embarked on a mission of full filling a childhood dream of having my own arcade... by building one.  Of course we don't have a big house with a big basement game room, so I decided to go miniature for my arcade.  As always click on the pictures for a larger version.

First up is my mini-virtual pinball cabinet, which I have dubbed PinDog.  Because of course all my computers have "dog" names (currently typing this on my laptop, a Thinkpad Yoga named DownDog ;) and essentially what virtual pinball machines are is computers running pinball software in a cabinet made to look like a pinball machine with 2 or 3 monitors.  So without further ado here are a couple pictures of PinDog being built and the final, well almost, product.

Trial assembly of the carcass,

fit the 3 monitors and the speakers,

add paint and some buttons...

and you have an almost finished PinDog at the cabin.

After PinDog was mostly complete and setup with a bunch of different tables, you can play virtually any pinball table that was ever made, I moved on to making the next project.. these things just happen. Really they do.

While I played some pinball growing up, I went through my teenage years in the great ascension of the video game era playing games such as Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Defender, and a whole bunch of lesser known names.  So of course I wanted to be able to play them as well!  So borrowing upon other peoples designs I came up with Dan's Misspent Youth Arcade, or as it's known around here, M.Y. Arcade.  So while it to at it's heart is a computer and all my computers seem to have those dog names, this one alas does not.. nor does the one after this sadly.  Here's more pics :)

test assembly next to PinDog 

More black paint

load up some games.

Add some cool graphics, and play away.

The controls on M.Y. Arcade are setup to play some specific games (asteroids, missile command, defender and space zap) and work for others especially those with a 4-way joystick as this is setup that way like Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong. But there are whole categories that really cannot be played on M.Y. Arcade.  So I'm sure you can guess what that means... yes another arcade machine.

For this one I went even smaller to be able to easily transport it in a tub up to the cabin on the trailer behind the snowmobile, well that and it's just plain cool :)  Dubbed "Little Bastard" and themed after one of my favorite beers Arrogant Bastard Ale, this game is setup with dual (or is it duel?) 8-way joysticks and setup to play a whole bunch of different classic games like Zaxxon, Xevious, 1942, Crazy Climber and BattleZone.  So finally even more pictures.

just stacked parts

rotating display assembly

wiring time

Complete Little Bastard at the cabin.

Little Bastard's display, is actually made of a 7" Windows tablet. So it functions as not just the display, it actually is what runs the games as well.  One thing I didn't mention is that the display in M.Y Arcade can be rotated manually by grabbing it and pulling it out the front and turning, but the display in Little Bastard rotates automatically depending on whether the game being run is setup for landscape or portrait mode.

This is just a summery of the builds, for those that may be interested you can find more about each by clicking on the titles below.

PinDog at VP forums

M.Y. Arcade at BYOAC forums

Little Bastard at BYOAC forums


Oh, and I almost forgot the final pic.  The guys all together.. The Arcade: