Yes, I know I’m giving up Centipede and Tempest with this design, but I’m okay with that for now. However, I’m willing to forego trackballs, spinners, flight sticks, and other exotic input devices. As mentioned, I’m interested in most of the range of arcade games from the 1970s into the early 1990s. This makes ALL the difference in terms of what types of controls you buy, how big the panel is, what type of electronics you need, and so on.

The first step in designing one of these is figuring out which games you want to play. I’d also like to thank the You Don’t Know Flack podcast for being very informative, and of course Slag Coin, arguably the best single resource there is on this topic. I did a ton of research over at the Build Your Own Arcade Forum. No crazy airbrushing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles driving the car from Pole Position here. I went with a simple all-white design, because it will match the decor in the room it will be going into. Here’s a demonstration of the coin buttons: They’re real US quarters which sit in slots, resting on buttons underneath. Here’s a close up of two of the signature features: servo-powered joystick mode selection, and coin slots: The feel of dropping in a coin to start a game is an important visceral moment, so I wanted to capture that somehow. I wanted something clean, fairly compact, but beefy enough to play most games from 1970 up through about 1993. Rather like a samurai making her own sword, this is something of a rite of passage for people who want to play these old games The Right Way™. The boys at No Quarter have rekindled my love of those games, but to play them properly you need the right equipment. If you’ve never played Dig Dug or Space Invaders in a smoke-filled, dimly-lit room with purple carpet, blacklights, and a creepy dude shifting pot in the corner, then you don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s all about remembering and reliving classic arcade games, of the sort us folks-of-a-certain-age grew up with. I’ve been listening to a really great podcast lately called No Quarter. This is what happens when there’s nothing on TV.

Build arcade control panel