Hello all. I've never used a blog before and up until a few weeks ago I didn't even know what one was so I apologize in advance if this one sucks. This is going to be a place for me to post pictures and detail the progress of building my own arcade machine. I might use it for something else down the road though - you never know.

Anyway, about a 18 months ago I was wasting time surfing the web and I came across www.arcadecontrols.com which is a great website dedicated to arcade enthusiasts who have actually taken the time to design and build their own arcade machines. As soon as I saw what people had been doing I knew I had to build one myself. I spent countless hours in arcades growing up in the 80s and it would be so cool to be able to play all those old games again in my own house.

Over the next few months, I learned all about how these things worked. You could build you own, buy an old one and restore it or have someone build you one (there are tons of companies I never knew about who cater to arcade machines and the like). There are a million different joysticks, spinners, trackballs, pushbuttons, steering wheels etc. and a million ways to lay it all out. You also have to decide what you want to play the games on - a monitor or TV? It can be overwhelming at first. I think the best approach is to figure out which games you want to be able to play and design it to accommodate that. Inside the cabinet, most people use a computer and a program called MAME, which is used to play the games. That's the (very) basics I guess. What I like most about this hobby (aside from the finished product) is that it is completely up to the builder to decide how it looks - there are a lot of unique cabinets out there!

After doing a TON of research and basically reading everything I could I decided on building a cocktail cabinet. I thought about building an upright but there's just no room in my house for one - maybe when I get a bigger house I'll have a dedicated game room with all sorts of fun stuff in there but for now the cocktail will have to do.

I'll post more details along with some construction photos later on...