Week 4

Moving right along. We made a lot of progress in a short amount of time tonight. We traced the first side onto another sheet and cut out the other side from that. We are getting faster now that we are learning our way around the circular saw and working a little more efficiently.

Next steps will be trimming the edges of the two sides so that they exactly mirror each other, and framing out the inside and getting this thing to stand up. We'll have to go buy some more wood before next week.

Week 3

We are making visible progress! The right side of the cabinet is cut out and we used it and our cardboard mockup of the controls to get a feel for the size and shape. Everything is coming along nicely!

Week 2

This week we designed what size and shape we would use for the sides of the cabinet. We sketched it out on a graph paper and then outlined what we would cut out on our first sheet of plywood. We didn't get to the point of actually making cuts yet though because we didn't have a proper blade for the circular saw. We cut out part of the control panel with a hand saw but it was slow going.

Week 1

Tonight was our first session working on the cabinet. We are planning to work a little bit each Thursday evening. It might take us a long time to finish it, but that's ok.

The big goal for tonight was to figure out what the control panel would look like. We mocked it up out of cardboard and drew a button layout on it. We even put real joysticks in there at the end. The pics below show our progress so far.

We code named the effort "Project Cherry Road Cuidado" after some text printed on the cardboard box we used for the control panel design.

Building a MAME Cabinet

For close to a decade now, I have wanted to create an arcade cabinet running emulation software. The task always seemed cost prohibitive and a bit daunting. I don't really have any woodworking tools and buying equipment just for one project didn't make much sense.

My best friend, Ash, got into woodworking recently and we are now working together to build me an arcade machine. We will document the progress here.