How to Turn an Old Arcade Machine Into a 5,000-Game Super-Machine — A Step By Step Guide
If you have some basic handyman skills and an old computer lying around, you can turn an old arcade machine into a MAME arcade machine, capable of playing nearly every arcade game ever made using free PC software. The project you’re going to see is a one-off, meaning I did it once for fun, and that was it. I bought the original machine for $50 USD but sold it a few years later for $2,400. If you follow these steps, you can make a similar machine. It’s fun, and it’s really not that hard. I’ve broken the entire job down into manageable steps for you, so read on!
Step 1 — Find an old arcade machine
This step isn’t very difficult. There are loads of old arcade machines out there, and any machine will do, EVEN IF IT DOESN’T WORK AT ALL. I found one on Craigslist that was an hour away from my home for only $50. Since I owned my own pickup truck, I went and got it myself. If you don’t have a pickup truck, people will often deliver for a fee. What did I manage to get for $50, you might ask? Bask in the glory of this old Capcom Bowling game!
“Wow, what a horrible piece of garbage you picked up there, Erik!” you might be saying. Haha, you’re sort of right! That being said, I was actually very glad to find this specific machine, because this Capcom Bowling game (which is a terrible game, by the way) is actually a rethemed Centipede machine! You can see some long-ago previous owner swapped out the Centipede labels, put a different sticker on the controls and slapped some awful wooden stick-on paneling on the sides, and called it a day. Here’s what it might have looked like originally. My goal was to retheme it as the original Centipede game, but with the ability to play nearly every arcade game ever made.
Of course, it doesn’t look like this anymore, so now it’s time for:
Step 2 — Repairing the cabinet
Taking a look at the cabinet, you can see it is in fairly poor condition. Don’t get me wrong, it was structurally solid as a rock, but unfortunately banged to hell and back from thirty years of use and abuse. I wanted to restore the arcade machine to nearly-original appearance, and I presume you’d want to do something like that too. The edges were all banged up and partially filled with auto body filler (!), the black rubber molding was smashed and torn, and the body was pretty scratched and banged-up in general.
The first step here was to disassemble the machine. The control panel was the easiest to remove, as it was held in by a pair of clips. I did NOT take apart any of the interior electronics at any point during this project. Here’s a photo of the machine mostly taken apart.
I ripped/broke the horrible fake wooden paneling off the side, sanded the sides fairly smooth, and also gave the rest of the wood a quick sanding-over. I also pulled out all of the chewed-up black rubber T-molding (that’s what it’s called). To my surprise, the auto-body filler had actually done a great job, so I built up the rest of the missing chunks of MDF (which is what these cabinets are made of, so don’t let them get wet) with more auto body filler. After sanding that down, the cabinet was in much better shape.
Step 3 — Figuring out the controls
This part is important. While you can have 5,000 arcade games available on this machine, you can’t have the CONTROLS to play every one of those games. Some games required just two buttons and a joystick while some needed trackballs or six buttons. Other required steering wheels or even flight yokes! In order to play as many games as possible, I chose to add a control layout that included the following:
- Two joysticks
- Two sets of six buttons
- One trackball
- Player 1 and Player 2 buttons
- “Add Credit” buttons for both Player 1 and Player 2
Naturally, I didn’t have any of those things laying around. That meant it was time to go onto eBay! For about $50 USD, you can buy a large selection of buttons in any imaginable colors and a pair of joysticks. You will also need to buy a tiny green computer card called a “USB Encoder.” They are very cheap, around $10–20. Often, they come as sets with buttons and joysticks on eBay.
You can also buy a trackball for $20–100 USD, depending on the kind you want. The cheaper ones come with a USB plug, which is perfect, but I don’t know the quality of those. I bought the more expensive HAPP 3" trackball that you can also find all over eBay. They are original arcade quality and will pretty much last forever, if you go that route. Just be sure that whatever you get has a USB cable, should you want a trackball.
If you go with the cheaper trackballs, it actually is easier to wire your buttons later to act like mouse buttons.
Step 4 — Design your new control board
The control setup I wanted required a larger control board than original, so I had to build one from scratch. It looks and sounds harder than it really is. First, I took some measurements of the gap on the arcade cabinet where the control panel used to be so I knew how much room I had to play with. Once my buttons and such arrived from eBay, I knew the exact size of the buttons. Then it was just a matter of taping a few pieces of regular white paper together and drawing the board. I cut some paper shapes exactly the size of the buttons, trackball, and joysticks out, and then arranged them on the paper. When I was happy with all the placements, I traced around them and then cut holes out of the paper, making a stencil. Finally, I taped the paper stencil onto a new piece of MDF (available at Home Depot for around $5). Here’s the completed drawing.
Everything you above was drawn in pencil. If there’s an “X” or a “+,” it was to be cut out. The round holes for the buttons were simply drilled out with a $1 spade bit. Be sure to put that “+” on the center of each circle so that you know where to place the point of the spade bit. The squares were also cut in the center with a spade bit and then a simple hand-held jigsaw was used to finish the square.
After that, it was just a matter of painting. I used Rustoleum gray spray primer (two coats) and semi-gloss Rustoleum black spray paint (3 light coats). Always, always, always go with more coats that are thin instead of less coats that are thick. It’s almost impossible to go too thin with the coats. Also, don’t make the mistake of painting when it’s too cold, or you’ll be stripping all the ruined paint off while cursing under your breath, like I did, before painting it all over again. At this time, I also masked and spray-painted the main arcade cabinet. Now that you’ve done that, you get to do the most scary-looking part, which is…
Step 5— Install the controls
The buttons themselves are very easy. They just drop into the holes, and you hand-screw the plastic covers on from the bottom of the board. That’s it. Here’s what they look like.
Note that this button comes with a pre-installed micro-switch. If you find buttons you really love that don’t have the micro-switches pre-installed, you can buy them for $0.30 each. They just pop into place.
Next, attach the joysticks and trackball with screws from the top. I went with fancy rounded screws that were nearly identical to what was on the vintage arcade games, but that’s optional.
Once you’ve done all of that, your board will look very nice, even though it’s not functional yet! Here is a picture of my control board!
Finally, you have to wire everything. Below is a picture of my wired control panel. Please don’t panic when you see this. It looks scary, but it’s really not. Really, it’s very, very simple and takes almost no skill at all. Please, please, please don’t freak out.
Here it is…..
Wait! Relax! I told you not to freak out! Just relax! Let me break this down for you. It’s actually really, really, really easy. Just take a look at the drawing I made of the switches that will be on the bottoms of all of your buttons and joysticks.
Each button will have only two wires. COM means ground. All you have to do is use small wires to connect the COM on the first switch to the COM on the next switch, and then the COM on the next switch, etc. You’re just daisy-chaining all of the switches together until you’ve done all the switches. The order doesn’t even matter. You should use crimp-style connectors like these:
Take a look at the picture of my control board again. See the little green computer card on the lower right? That’s the USB encoder.
It’s basically a keyboard emulator. Every one of the little connectors is like key on a keyboard. Therefore, when you click your “Player 1” switch, it’s like pressing “d” (or something else on a keyboard). The “Player 2” switch would be like pressing “q” or some other letter/number on a keyboard. To make this work, you just have to run a wire from the “NO” terminal of each switch to a different slot in the USB emulator. To connect a wire to a slot on the USB keyboard emulator card, just put a wire in one of the holes and tighten down the screws. It honestly doesn’t matter which slot each wire goes to, as long as each wire has its own slot. The next thing is to connect the final COM/Ground wire to the slot on the card labelled “GND” or “COM.” In my photo, the white wires are COM wires and the red wires are NO wires that go from each switch to the slots in the emulator card.
TO SUMMARIZE, YOU JUST DO THIS:
1 — Connect all the COMs together on the switches and then wire to the GND on the card.
2 — Connect each NO from each switch to its own slot on the card.
You do NOT have to use a mouse like I did. I built this cabinet before people were selling HAPP trackballs with USB outputs, so don’t worry about that. However, if you choose to hack a mouse to connect it to your trackball, there are guides online.
Once you’ve done this, you can connect a USB cable to the card, screw the card into the wood, and you’re done with the control panel! Now you can mount it onto the arcade cabinet however you’ve chosen. I built a support frame for the control panel and used wood screws to attach.
Step 6 — Deal with the monitor
Remember that this is going to be based upon a PC, so now you have to make the monitor compatible. Even if the old monitor works, the wiring is simply not compatible with any modern computer, so it will have to go. I was able to recoup $120 by selling the monitor on eBay (it’s called a JAMMA monitor). I also sold the old control board for $50. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I should make my life easy by just using an old computer monitor or small HDTV from my basement (which would easily connect to most computers that are less than ten years old), or go with an old tube television that had an S-Video out. While the HDTV/monitor route would have been easier, I wanted the “old-school” look of a CRT screen, so I went to Goodwill, which was still selling them at the time, and bought a Sony tube TV for $20. If you went the easier HDTV/computer monitor route, I wouldn’t blame you one bit. It would certainly be easier to connect.
Once the TV was home, it was very basic carpentry to fit the TV to the arcade cabinet. I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of the process, but here is the result.
Step 7 — Make all your miscellaneous repairs/changes to your cabinet
Here’s what I did for my cabinet:
- Bought and installed new T-molding for the trim. I wanted my cabinet to look close-to-new, so I sprung for it. It wasn’t too expensive, about $1 per foot. It just taps lightly into place with a hammer.
2. I tested the speaker in the top of the cabinet and found out it still worked. It was a standard 6x9 speaker like you find in cars, so it would have been easy to replace if I needed to, but I didn’t. I rewired it so that it had a headphone-style jack at the end to plug into the PC’s sound card. It’s just two wires. Very easy.
3. The lock was missing, so I bought another one on eBay brand new for $5.
4. One of light bulbs was out on the coin slot, so I just replaced both bulbs. $3.
5. The original coin slots are just micro-switches that get activated when a quarter slides through, so I also ran wires from those switches to the little green keyboard emulator board under the control panel. This made it so that whenever someone put in a quarter, it would add a credit in any game I played. Pretty cool, huh? The two “Add coin” buttons on the control panel did the same thing, but I wanted to be able to add credits with coins too.
6. I replaced the light behind the marquee (the top part of the cabinet that lights up). It was just a regular 24" fluorescent light from Lowes or Wal Mart.
Now that you’ve done whatever extra things you want to do with the arcade cabinet, now it’s time for:
Step 8 — Retheming
In my case, I wanted the cabinet to look like it originally did — a Centipede arcade game. On eBay, and probably other places online, you can buy a new marquee (the graphic on top), a new screen surround, and a vinyl sidings for pretty much any important retro arcade game out there. Some people choose to buy original marquees and screen surrounds, but that’s up to you. I went for all-new reproductions. They literally just sit inside the cabinet, and they’re very easy to put in.
The side graphics are another story. They are EXTREMELY difficult to put on well. The graphics come in huge, single-piece sticky vinyl sheets that are very hard to put down without creating air bubbles. Find a video online about exactly how to do this correctly. Most importantly, TAKE YOUR TIME. You might choose to put your T-molding on after this step.
Step 9 — Install the PC and the MAME software
This arcade machine will run on a standard Windows PC. It should use Windows 7 or higher. The PC doesn’t have to be new, and it doesn’t have to be powerful. Probably any old PC sitting in your closet from the last ten years should work. It will need a graphics input that can accept the plug from your monitor. Also, it should have WiFi, because why not have your 1980’s arcade machine have an Internet connection? It might be useful.
Now, you might be tempted to just slap a tower PC or old laptop inside the cabinet, and be done with it. I considered this. However, I was concerned that with the arcade cabinet being such an enclosed environment that the PC might overheat. Therefore, I removed all the components from an old PC and literally hot-glued them into the side of the cabinet so they could breathe. Here’s a picture.
What are all of those other wires and components, you might ask? To answer your question, I left all of the old hardware and wiring inside the cabinet. I didn’t touch any of it, should anyone ever wish to convert it back. Again, maybe you can just stick a laptop in there and be done with it. It’s up to you. I also screwed an old power strip into the floor of the cabinet.
The next thing to do is plug your USB trackball into the PC. It will now act just like a mouse. I also chose to attach an old Goodwill ($2) USB keyboard to make my life easier. Don’t forget to plug the speaker into your computer using the headphone jack.
You will need to install MAME, which is a free arcade emulator software. It’s easy to install. You can find the link here (and many other places on the Internet). Also on this webpage is pretty much every arcade game ever made. Yes, that game you remember and loved as a kid is there. The files are tiny, so pick as many games as you’d like. You unpack the ROMS in the Mame “ROMS” folder. Once you’ve done that, you can load the MAME software, and all of the games you’ve downloaded will be selectable and playable. Inside the game settings, you can program all of your buttons simply by selecting, “Button 1” and then pushing your button of choice, and then continuing down the line with each control. You only have to do this once for your control set. Once you do it, you’ll see it’s very easy. Below is a screenshot of some of my games. You just double-click on the game to play it.
Step 10 — Turn on your new cabinet and play games!
Finally, after a great deal of (fun) work, your arcade machine should be ready to play! Here are pictures of mine.
So there you go! You’ve completely retrofitted an old arcade cabinet with new hardware from your basement and now have the ability to play pretty much every arcade game ever made! Please note that if you don’t want a huge, heavy machine, some people have created similar setups by building small table-top cabinets from scratch, and then putting everything inside of that. It’s up to you. I just grew up in the 80’s and thought it would be awesome to have a full-sized arcade machine in the house. I hope this step-by-step guide helps you!
