I’ve always been into classic gaming, and when I was younger I loved going to arcades. At some point during college I stumbled upon someone’s project to convert an arcade cabinet to be connected to a desktop computer running emulation software, which ignited my own interests. With some searching and some free time, I was able to find a Golden Tee cabinet with monitor problems that someone was giving away. I jumped at the opportunity, and a fully functional gaming arcade cabinet was the result.
The Cabinet
The cabinet started as a Golden Tee 2005 machine with monitor issues. The internals were replaced with a modern computer and a 24″ LCD monitor.
Specs:
- Processor: 3Ghz AMD Athlon 6000+
- 4GB DDR2 RAM
- 250GB Hard Drive
- Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS (320MB)
- OS: Windows XP (You don’t see it though)
- Monitor: 24″ LCD
- Speakers: Creative 2.1 (Gotten at Wal Mart… surprisingly good quality/fit)
Control Panel
The control panel was completely rebuilt to be a 2 player game pad with a 4-way directional stick and 8 buttons per player. The coin slots are also operational (there’s a free-play button too; it’s just for show) Control panel image is from GameOnGrafix.
Software
- Frontend: AtomicFE
- Additional:
- Joy2Key – for those pesky keyboard-only games
- Some small custom utilities
- Emulators:
- MAME
- Project64
- Gens
- Stella
- Zsnes
- Dolphin
- nullDc
- VisualBoyAdvance
- pcsx2
- epsxe
- Various Computer Games (Doom, Sonic Robo Blast, etc… hopefully Audiosurf)