ULTIMATE $100 Arcade Cabinet Build

hey what is up guys Jack and Matt here with the toaster Bros and after a year and a half of gruesome pain and awfulness we bring you the arcade cabinet let's get right into it shall we as a creator creating content is almost second nature once the idea hits my mind I almost go into autopilot doing scripting recording and editing until it's complete however getting it seen on the crowded space that is YouTube is a whole other challenge with two buddy though you get access to a wide range of tools like tag optimizers in search ranking results to help you optimize your content to succeed on youtube want to give it a shot click the link down below to learn more so as jackson mentioned this project took over a year you're gonna have to get done and it's not due to how difficult it was probably gonna got this done a lot sooner but anyways the main focus of this arcade cabinet was we wanted to build the cheapest arcade cabinet that we could and you know here at the toastie bros were all about saving some money so this thing right here actually cost us a grand total of $100 you heard that right only $100 that make something like this which one is a really cool showpiece and also is functional you can play games on it I have Super Mario Bros 3 up right now multiplayer multiplayer games two joysticks all the buttons and everything and today we're going to talk about the process of putting this thing together and how you can somewhat follow along to make one at home so there is quite a few different ways you guys can do this so we decided to just literally use a big sheet of plywood the head lying around this is like quarter-inch plywood nothing fancy and it kind of shows because you look at places like the corners and whatnot that we painted and it's not perfect the other thing is that we hand cut all of this wood we actually just use a simple SkillSoft and Zacks artist skill to basically draw every single line that we needed and then I would go and cut it Matt would be my hold-down guys slash camera guy and we basically just kind of went from there now yes and you have something like a hackerspace nearby that has like a laser cutter to where you could actually get very precise cuts on wood it would be a much easier task and probably affordable because they don't really charge you that much to do it because of that we actually did make some mistakes with the initial it wasn't a perfect system it actually slowed us down a little bit Jackson cut straight through what at one point you know what happens with stuff like this it's really the only way to be able to get these type of like circular cuts is if you use something like a jigsaw you have to use some type of really thin blade to be able to do all kinds of swirls and whatnot but you know overall cutting it it took a while and it took a while to get everything to line up right but it wasn't the worst thing in the world and it was kind of a bonding experience for all of us toasty roast you just work it outside in the summertime cutting some wood you guys know what I mean so as you guys can see from the budge of this video they monitor barely been impacted anybody that's because this is literally like one of those monitors you get from your school used or that someone would just throw out because they're really crappy but it's like a 17 to 19 inch old you know non 1080 or anything it literally uses VGA monitor of course you do have to adapt it from VGA to HDMI for the Raspberry Pi but that's not a super expensive thing to do and we actually took the bezels off of this monitor it's literally just the actual screen we had to tape some stuff back up after we took everything apart but it showed all the weight down and I made it to where it's literally just like a panel at that point and we were just able to actually use some old L brackets that I kind of bent that hold the monitor in place obviously another challenge was actually the buttons and like joystick having to do the holes for those luckily I had a drill press we were able to use hole saws in a drill press and pretty easily sized up the holes to be able to fit all the buttons we'll talk more about this joystick layout later but let's talk about the painting and the painting was relatively simple this black coating right here is just your basic spray paint just a couple layers of it it did take a lot because of this cheap plywood to actually soak into it and get a good black color if you have at least two cans of spray paint you should be perfectly fine that's relatively affordable and then the paint trim we went with a very basic like hobbyist paint it's like an acrylic paint that we basically just went through and slowly but surely blares on layers it took a long time to do that there was probably a way better solution for that and if we did do this over again we'd probably get better paint just to save us time but it did turn out pretty good and it kind of has that old-school arcade cabinet look to it so it kind of fits the whole retro theme and the paint really did turn out well and it fits our new color scheme on the You Tube channel the black the green and then we'll talk more about this later so we got pretty lucky on the wiring we thought it was gonna be like really really difficult but it's actually a plug in place each one of these buttons has two wires going to it just to basically have an on-off signal so each side here actually has its own PCB that everything gets plugged into and then actually just goes straight to the PI via USB I was really surprised with how easy that configuration was because when we first saw these wires coming in from straight from China first of all it took forever for the stuff to show up we were a little bit concerned but after getting everything laid out and put together and cable managing it just like the toastie bros do it turned out really well we actually ended up making this acrylic panel really earlier from the start and we kind of just left it blank thinking that we didn't really know exactly we're going to do yet we were in the process of like changing our logo and some of the time because this was a year and a half ago and we got lucky we did this at the very end this is literally two pieces of sticker paper that we just ran through my printer at home and luckily we had some color ink you know so we're actually able to make the logo look really nice Matt just hopped in Photoshop he was able to actually make it to where it like stretched across two pieces of paper and we just hand-cut it we took us two tries because the first one got a bunch of bubbles and whatnot a second try though lay down really flat we didn't have any like major gaps or anything so we just went with it and then of course it has light behind it which will turn up the lights in a minute so you guys can see but it's a full RGB spectrum with a remote velcroed on the back so we can actually change the LED color and brightness and whatnot or even turn it off and we were actually very impressed with how much light actually comes through this panel with just this sticker paper using the sticker paper in the way we printed it there wasn't a whole lot blocking the light the paper was relatively thin so you could still see through it and when we go to the b-roll sequence after this you will see how nice this actually looks with the lights turned off so obviously we needed a way to get access everything we didn't want this to be something where we put it together and then there is like no way to troubleshoot it / work on things we also wanted to go to upload games the Raspberry Pi with the USB drive so we decided to make a little backdoor and we were kind of smart with it we didn't know where this thing was going to end up because it's taking so long we were like it could end up here could end up at someone's house it could end up in somewhere public we didn't really know so we actually ended up putting a lock on it which a lot of arcade systems will have locks in them so that people can't just get in a tamper with it so this actually has a full door in the back with a hinge and a lock so it's actually a fully functional door and there's enough room to where you can get in there mess with the monitor you can change connections you can even mess with all the wiring up here and if you really need to you can even take this whole entire board off with just four screws and literally have full access to all the buttons and wiring now one thing we actually realized after putting this all together was we didn't account for a speaker so you could actually hear the game audio but it's a really easy thing to fix there's just a three and a half inches jack on the Raspberry Pi plug in a cheap speaker set into the back of this box and it should do a good enough job producing sound all right so that pretty much wraps up this entire arcade cabinet how about we transition to a little bit of really nice b-roll so you can see exactly what it looks like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so here at the toaster Rose we're typically really good about finishing projects we actually kind of were talking about it and hey we've really never had anything that we started and didn't finish until we would always come back to this literally every time we'd have this talk would go oh yeah the arcade cabinet was the one thing that was kind of keeping us from keeping our perfect streak and the sad part is the last like six months this thing has basically been done we just didn't have this we didn't have the RGB lights and that was pretty much it other than that we literally just needed to do a couple of small things and it was just sorry to find the time especially with us getting the office and everything but then now that we're all settled we're having more time to go to do stuff like this again and hopefully some case mods coming to you guys sometime soon so if that's something you are interested in please give us some suggestions in the comment section down below we'd love to read over those suggestions I know Zach definitely will because he is very interested in us doing more case mods on the channel so let us know and convince us that it's a good idea to make more videos about it evening so as always don't forget to Like comment and subscribe and we will see you guys in the next one good bye it's done yeah [Music]

Channel: Toasty Bros

Views: 161,816

Keywords: Toastybros, arcade, pc, mame, cabinet, arcade cabinet, crt, games, diy, gaming, rgb, build, guide, retro

Id: oYrcffPGxaY

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019