I'm going to walk through the steps of making a retro, bartop arcade cabinet. There are many people who have blogged about this subject or put videos and instructions on Youtube, Pinterest, Instructables, etc. I picked up my knowledge by trawling through as many pages and videos as I could. There are people that are much better than me at the woodworking and those who are better at the computer / electronics side of things. However, I haven't found many blogs which cover all the things you need to thing about to start the project and some of the pitfalls along the way. I'll also try to highlight things I'd like to do differently if I had the correct skills / knowledge in the hope someone might be able to help on a future project.

I'll try to keep each article as short as possible and link everything through an index page.

I've been tinkering with retro gaming for a long time. I was born in the early 1970's and had a ZX Spectrum when it was released in 1982 but played lots of arcade games at this time. The arcade games could be found in leisure centres / swimming pools or fish and chip shops at that time. I've been reliving my youth by setting up my old Spectrum and playing arcade games on my PC using MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). This was great but I really wanted the look of an old cabinet and the feel of the joystick and buttons.

I built my first cabinet in the summer of 2017 after a lot of reading, watching and thinking about the subject. The end to end topic is a lot broader than most people make out. I've just been asked to make another bartop machine and that gives me an excellent opportunity to structure this better than my first build and pass on that knowledge.

Although I'll be covering a lot of topics, I won't be going into huge detail. I'm a firm believer in doing research and doing it 'your' way. If anyone needs help, they can contact me via my contact page. If I get good questions, I'll update the blog accordingly.

I suggest starting at the index page which has links to all the steps I'm covering.