As I was building the Punch-Out!! style arcade cabinet, I had a few ideas for some smaller bar top arcade machines as well. I thought of making an older full size arcade machine and creating a smaller bar top cabinet in its image. Instead, I decided to pay homage to some of the classic NES games I played when I was younger. I thought wouldn't it be neat if the game Metroid had its own cabinet? So I decided to base a bar top design on Metroid, how it might look back in the 80's, that was at first anyways. I then thought about a more modern looking machine and came up with an idea that perhaps it could play "just about anything" by way of basic arcade controls, pc emulators, usb ports for several different controller types and built-in usb Nintendo controller adapters. An idea formed in my head that perhaps the villain of the game, the "Mother Brain" would serve as the "PC" that I plug everything into... or at least seem like it. By tapping into the power of the Mother Brain... I figured she can remember almost anything.
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From the description of the little video I made for it:
Plywood exterior (24"H x 24"D x 18"W) houses AMD 64X2 4800 CPU, 2GB Ram, EVGA 7800GTX, Soundblaster eXremeMusic and Logitech R-20 w/ subwoofer. Samsung 17" lcd. 2 Yate Loon fans mounted on top and back. PC power button mounted on back. Could play just about every Nintendo console game from N64 on down to the NES and every hand held GBA game on down to the GameBoy.
Ultimarc mini-pac and Ultrastik plus Wico buttons and a Happs 2 1/4" trackball for arcade controls. RetroUSB NES, SNES plus Adaptoids and USB ports for controllers.
Happs coin reject button doesn't accept coins but pressing it in activates Coin 1 button in MAME.
Mother Brain made of Super Sculpey clay. DVI-Out and Optical-Out on the back for external screen/sound system. One power cord (one still image shows a few cords but they aren't attached to the machine) out the back which is a Bits Limited Smartstrip. When PC turns on, everything (cathodes, controls, sound, LCD) powers on at once.
When I sit back sometimes and look at the Metroid cabinet I'm reminded that before I made the Punch-Out!! cabinet, my only real woodworking experience was an occasional crappy birdhouse and only electronics type experience was building my first PC. I really pushed myself and took my time to learn whatever necessary to create the Punch-Out cabinet and did this even moreso for the Metroid one. The arcadecontrols.com forums are a real wealth of info on how to build an arcade machine and I couldn't have done it without using the search function on those forums extensively.
Also, my only prior experience with clay was play-doh. I thought the Mother Brain halves came out pretty decent. I think I am a pretty lazy person by nature, but I've found that I get motivated by things which I think are cool. Basically this project says I think Metroid is cool. That's about the gist of it... I don't try to make these projects to say "oh look at what I can do" I just get inspired by games that I like and dedicating an arcade cabinet or arcade stick to them is my way of saying "Hey I think this game is cool," or in this case "Remember this first game in the series?" I grew up in the arcade era, so I especially like playing the classics, fighting games and newer Xbox Live type games with the old school buttons and joystick.
I was very happy to see the Metroid cabinet made the pages of many different gaming and tech sites after I finished it last October (2007). I wish I did the video a little better after hearing some complaints about the image quality. I originally filmed it in widescreen and it was a 989mb file... well I was on dial-up back then so I scrunched it into a 15mb or so file lol, plus I made it mostly just to let people from arcadecontrols see how it looked lit up, so I did it in very low light. The Mother Brain also received a Mamey award in the Misc. category which I am quite proud of considering the other most excellent projects in all of the categories.
