Recently retired, I find myself with more time than money—and a desire to break away from my novel writing now and then. Way, way, way back in the day I’d made a cocktail-style MAME cabinet, which has long since moved on to other owners. I found myself with a hankering to play some of my old 80’s favorites on a proper console.

I also wnated to play more digital pinball. I’ve been loving what Zen Studios has been doing with the old Williams games, but playing them on an iPad just lacks… scale. Impact. Something. So I went down a rabbit hole and decided to build myself a new upright console.

I actually started trying to do this on a Mac, but O. M. G. Everything is hard. The Virtual Pinball and Future Pinball projects are great, but getting anything to run reliably, especially on an Apple silicon Mac, is nigh-impossible. So I finally gave up, got a little Geekom A5 mini-PC, and resigned myself to Windows.

So:

The project will use both MAME and Zen’s Pinball FX. I really debated that pinball choice, but it’s not permanent, and they were having a huge sale on the tables I wanted most. I’ll miss “F-14 Tomcat” and “Robocop,” since they don’t have those, but I’ll live. Pretty much everything I play a lot—”Champions Pub,” “Attack from Mars,” and “Safe Cracker”—are available.

The physical cabinet has one hard-and-fast requirement: When not in use, this thing needs to occupy less than about one square foot, and it needs to tuck nicely against a wall—and we don’t have a lot of blank wall space for this purpose. So I would obviously not be building a traditional cabinet.

In terms of wants in addition to that overriding need, I had a few items:

• I still want the “full cabinet experience” at least visually. I like all the bezel art, and the marquees, and all that.

• I’d love to be able to play both horizontal and vertically oriented games—but having a vertical (portrait) monitor is a must-have in order for pinball to play decently.

• I’d really, really love to be able to play on different control panel layouts without jamming everything into a single, wide console. I’m after the classic 80’s arcade games, which didn’t really include Street Fighter and the like. Consoles covered with a field of buttons just turn me off, and they’re huge to boot. In my perfect world, I want to ensure I can have a “native controller” experience for Tempest, Dig-Dug, Time Pilot, Smash TV, Tron, Blastroids (which I recognize is getting out of “80s classics”), and TMNT.

• I’d like the whole setup to be on wheels, because when we have a party, I do want to roll it right out into the middle of the room.

That last bit kept me up at night a lot.

So here’s where I’m at:

• I’m going with a 43” LCD TV mounted in portrait mode.

• I’m starting with a pretty bland wheeled TV stand, the kind you might see in use at a conference or expo. It has about 10 degrees of upward tilt, which will give me a good viewing angle. I will likely either build a “cabinet” around this at some point, or DIY myself a cabinet with a similar setup.

• The “guts” of the thing will be a wheeled cabinet. This will be 48” high, about 24” wide, and only about 9” deep, so it’ll fit flush up against the TV when not in use. The entire top of the cabinet will be a metal control panel. Inside the cabinet, under the control panel, will be the USB control encoder, the mini-PC, and whatnot. Below that will be space to slide in additional control panels.

The control panels will connect to USB hub inside the cabinet, as well as 12-connector plugs—one for each player position (4 pins for a joystick, 3 for fire buttons, 1 for player start, and 1 for ground; finding 10-pin connectors was hard so it’ll have a few spare pins). I’ll eventually have 4-5 panels:

• “Core:” Joystick (switchable between 4-way and 8-way), 2 fire buttons, player 1 and 2 start, and a spinner. This covers most of my games. There’ll also be a ball launch button on the front, and flipper + magna-save buttons on the side.

• “Twin Stick:” Smash TV and Krull. I hate Robotron. Four sticks total, 1Up and 2Up. A trick here is that I’ll repeat the ball launch button since it’ll be on the swappable portion of the console; the flipper and Magna-save buttons will be on the sides, and they’ll always be present.

• “Konami:” Two sticks, three buttons each. Simpsons, X-Men,a nd TMNT.

• “Twin Spin:” Blasteroids. Two spinners with 3 buttons each, plus 1Up, 2Up, and another ball launch. I do need to figure out how to replace the front-end navigation and game selection control, since this panel won’t have a joystick. I’m looking to see if I can find a wee little micro-joystick or something.

• “Tron:” Spinner, flight stick, 1Up and 2Up. Might skip the ball launch on this one.

• “Trackball:” Possibly. I’m terrible at most trackball games, so this one will only get made if there’s room in the cabinet for another panel.

MikesArcade.com has a blank metal 23” control panel that I’ll be using for all of these. I’m having graphics overlays made by GameOnGraphics.com. The control panel has a 7” deep top, and a 4” vertical “lip,” which is where the launch button will be mounted.

The idea is that you plug a console in (2 12-pin connectors and sometimes USB, like for spinners), and then just lay the thing down. Magnets will hold it in place while you play. The whole cabinet will be 3/4” plywood, as we live in a cabin and I’m under instructions to “keep it rustic.” I’ll stain it espresso to match a lot of the other trim woodwork in the place.

The encoder will be an Ultimarc iPAC-4, which is needed for those twin-stick games. I’ll have ample USB ports for the encoder and up to three other USB devices.

The joysticks will be Sanwa JLFs, because I love them. The “core” panel’s joystick will have a Thunderstick Studios TOS restrictor switcher, including a button on the top panel. That lets me switch between an 8-way stick and a 4-way stick, because playing old 4-way games with an 8-way stick is asking for low scores.

The panel will have a slightly angled-up section at the back, which will house my front-end controls (select, back, exit, etc), along with this puppy from DIY Retro Arcades. It channels the standard coin reject button from arcade cabinets, but it’s a legit “Push for Credit” button that’ll act as my coin-in.

The coin-in bit presented a bit of a problem with TMNT and Simpsons, because those cabinets originally had four coin slots—one for each character you could play. (X-men does this too, but the 2-player ROM uses one coin slot channel and lets each player pick their character). After some experimenting, I’m going to hook the coin button to all four coin inputs. So when you push it, every “character” gets a coin. I still have to work out the problem of dynamically re-mapping the joysticks to whatever characters you want to play, but I’m confident I can script something together.

My front-end will be Attract-Mode Plus. I agonized and experimented with this a ton, and actually built out a custom theme in LaunchBox as well, but at the end of the day, AM is a ton simpler. I built a vertical theme so it all looks great, and you can use joystick left/right to go from MAME to Pinball FX, and then up/down to select a game. I’ll post screen shots soon.

I also agonized to get proper MAME vertical artwork layouts for each game. These include a photorealistic rendering of the original game cabinet, its bezel artwork, a bit of its control panel, and of course the game screen itself. Since I’ve got this 43” vertical monitor, the monitor itself will become the cabinet. So I’ll still get my “cab vibes,” accurate for each game. It’s basically the look of the vCabinet v.4, although mine won’t look quite as sexy at first. But I’m very excited about the look, even if it took me six weeks to dig up—and in some cases, create—the needed artwork for every game.

Pinball Fx is especially vexing, by the way. It’s easy enough to launch it into a specific table from your front-end, but exiting a table basically requires a mouse. No bueno. So my “exit” button will be wired up to Alt+F4. That actually does “cleanly” and immediately exit the app, and has the side benefit of it not saving its place—so when you launch it again, you’re not in pause mode on the same table as last time. MAME doesn’t mind being Alt-F4’d either, so I can have a consistent usage pattern.

I really wish I could get good game play videos of all the pinball tables, so that the pinball ‘side’ of Attract-Mode looks more like the arcade ‘side.’ I may have to make those myself, I guess.

So that’s the plan! I’ve got a huge Amazon order coming in with components, and a trip to Home Depot on Monday to pick up lumber and hardware. I’ll post photos in upcoming posts as I go!