Readers Drives - C-Macc's

Posted at: Friday 17th October 2008

A PC in an arcade cabinet, emulating thousands of retro games

Ever since the days of the ZX Spectrum, I've been a big fan of computer gaming. I've owned nearly every console ever made, and played games on plenty of computers too, such as the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro. However, it wasn't until later that I bought my first PC: a 200MHz Pentium with a mere 32MB of RAM, which set me back £1,200. I now own a small army of computers, many of which have been modified with water-cooling kits. I like to think that if something can be modded, I'll give it a try.

The idea for my latest creation, C-Macc's, came from a discussion about retro gaming with my fiancée. One of us mooted the idea of the perfect gaming system: an arcade machine that could play any game you threw at it. To my fiancées dismay, it wasn't long before I set about building such a system and spending a lot of money on the components. I was determined to turn this dream into a reality by building an arcade machine containing a PC that would be capable of emulating every console known to man.

My starting point was to decide on an arcade cabinet to use, since I needed to know exactly how much internal space I had to work with. I spent a lot of time reading a very helpful forum called BYOAC (Build You Own Arcade Controls). Eventually, I decided to buy a blank arcade unit from Gremlin Solutions (www.gremlinsolutions.co.uk), a supplier of arcade hardware. As nostalgia was a major factor in my reasoning for building this games machine, I wanted to retain the feel of the old arcade games that I used to play, while giving it a modern appearance.


CHOOSING THE SHELL

I decided upon a white Japanese-style cabinet, but the first problem I encountered was fitting it into my car. The cabinet was so big that I had to cut away the seatbelt housing to squeeze it in. When I eventually returned home, I had to remove many of the doors from our house to get the cabinet indoors, a process that took hours.

After a lot of effort to move the cabinet into my house, I could finally start thinking about how I would build this PC. Big, chunky controllers are the aspect that people remember most fondly about arcade machines, so this was my first purchase. Rather than using a pre-built joystick, I decided to customise my own. I purchased a Sanwa Joystick JLF-TP with a large ball top from Gremlin Solutions. I wanted the buttons on the cabinet to light up, so I also bought some clear arcade buttons with 5V LEDs.

After further research, I realised that not only could I squeeze an entire PC into the arcade cabinet, but at a pinch, I could also fit in a Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii. A system such as this would be capable of playing any game ever made, whether new or old. It was at this point that I decided on the name C-Macc's, which stands for 'Complete - Multi-Arcade Console Computer System'.