During Thanksgiving breaking during my Freshman year of college, I decided I wanted to make an arcade machine. My brother Johnny and I were both home for like 3 days together so we jumped right into this project after ordering some parts to meet us at home. I don’t even remember any hesitation from any of my family members. Just wanting to build an arcade machine and my family being like, “sure okay” and getting to work.

We built the body out of MDF wood, small L brackets, and a table saw. We added hinges to make a door on the left side for access to the back.

Johnny did most of the thinking for the electronics components – and he was so creative. We took my old brick workhouse of a laptop from high school (complete with duck stickers covering the outside) and downloaded an emulator. We bought arcade machine buttons from Ebay. They totally sent us two “player two” buttons on accident.

Johnny ripped apart a keyboard and soldered the arcade buttons to the keyboard brain, and mapped the keys to the laptop. He spent a marathon day soldering the hundreds of wires. Seriously, all day.

We set an old monitor inside the cabinet and pushed it up to the hole in the arcade. It wasn’t a built in screen or anything, but I believe we get points for innovation on the cheap.

We spray-painted the outside a dark blue color and gave it white accents. I called it the Mega-Machine, since it reminded me of Megaman. I had always planned on getting a friend to add arcade style art to the side, but never got around to it.

We made it in 2011, and it floated around with me from apartment to apartment. It was offline for awhile, but it 2016 I booted her up again. At the end of 2017, I gave her a new brain. I retired the poor old duck laptop (may she rest in peace) with a Raspberry Pi 3. I replaced the keyboard motherboard with a specifically designed arcade button control panel, greatly reducing the number of wires and improving the button mapping. These improvements greatly reduced the amount of stuff that was shoved inside the cabinet box.

ADD PICTURES OF THE UPDATES I’VE DONE

The arcade would work better if it had more buttons for each side. But for two kids on Thanksgiving break, I think we did pretty good.