Arcade cabinet: The second one!

Some years ago I build my first DOOM II themed arcade cabinet. Back then I was happy with the result of my first build, but it had some things missing in the finish and was not as polished as I hoped.

So I gave it an other shot and build one again. This time I have some experience and tried to create a new DOOM II/UAC themed arcade cabinet with lots and lots of lights to make it really an eye catcher in the dark.

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I started of with some particle wood, cut out the right sizes. The curves I drew free handed and traced it with a jig saw. The design was basically some measurement from my old cabinet, only the control panel is now 10 cm higher for comfort. I did not document every part of the build, but here are some pictures with a little explanation.

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I recycled some parts from my old cabinet, like the TV, speakers, computer, ipac, and the joysticks.
I bought new AimTrack (light gun), marquee light, and illuminated push buttons for the looks and a plunger for playing pinball games.

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For UAC logo in the front I made a sticker with a lot of lines to make it easy traceable with a jig saw. I think it came out pretty neat and it breaks the flat clean look of the front.

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Now that all this is finished, I painted the whole cabinet in the color ‘Dark steel’ from Flexa, which is actually a paint suitable for walls, but also works on wood when you use a lot of primer. Below is a side-by-side of the old and the new cab!

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For power I used a PC-kind of socket (dunno the exact name) in the back.WP_002259

Light it up!

  • For the marquee I used a LED bar that runs of 12v.
  • The buttons all use 12v LEDS
  • For the bottom I used a 5 meter flexible LED strip that changes color.

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The marque is almost the same as my previous cabinet, I only slightly changed the planet behind the DOOM II logo.
For the control panel I went for a DOOM 3 PDA look.

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The control panel is made by painting a piece of wood gloss black and stick the control panel art on top of it. Only thing left to do is drill the holes for the buttons and wire it all.

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And with power applied it absolutely looks gorgeous!

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Almost finished. All to do now is put a PC inside, make a drawer for the keyboard and mouse to make maintenance easy, and fix the light gun inside the cab with some velcro.

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Aaaaand…. DONE!

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Out of the old box…

When digging trough some old projects I found ‘race game’, a flight game that would have racing with jets as a main concept. Eventually we never finished this and on Online demo party back in 2008 we used it as a base for ‘Uber Schraal’.

Arcade Cabinet

In 2009 we finished the game FUR, Fast Uber Racer, for the Pascal Game Programming competition Arcadia. This game was supposed to run on an arcade cabinet. Back then we had some plans to build ourself an arcade cabinet, but the lack of space we never started. Now that I had some space I decided to make my own arcade cabinet. It’s not only to run FUR, but also to run other games like Uber Zombie and MAME.

So I started out with a piece of wood and cut out the basic shape of the cabinet and screw and glue it all together. The fairly simple design and good power tools made this an easy job. I’m not going into the build details as the pictures are pretty clear I guess and there are lots of build tutorials out on the intertubes.

For the some technical details on the hardware use for the control panel:

  • Cabinet size: 180 cm in length, 64 in width (control panel is 70) and ~64 cm in depth.
  • 2 joysticks
  • Total of 18 buttons, 8 for each player and 2 on the side for pinball games
  • Coin mech that only accepts 1-euro coins
  • i-pac to use control panel as regular pc-keyboard
  • Front-end: Hyperspin
  • PC is running windows Vista

Further more I still need to order a new screen for the cabinet as this screen is somewhat small for this huge cabinet.

Softpedia

Somebody added .S.C.A.G. to Softpedia. Dunno who, but it’s great to see our game being promoted by other people!

qoute:

“.S.C.A.G.” has been tested in the Softpedia labs using several
industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of
adware/spyware components. We are impressed with the quality of your
product and encourage you to keep these high standards in the future.

To assure our visitors that .S.C.A.G. is clean, we have granted it with the
“100% CLEAN” Softpedia award. To let your users know about this
certification, you may display this award on your website, on boxes or
inside your product.

Released games…

This evening I had a chat with Mad Woody (coder/designer for some games including .S.C.A.G. and Uber Zombie) about mirroring .S.C.A.G. because his website broke down. While searching for .S.C.A.G. on the intertubes (I mean, the biggest mirror of them all is the internet) I stumbled upon this website: www.baixaki.com.br/pesquisa_develop.asp?c=28151.

After some research (10 seconds of Google) I figured it’s from Brazil or some kind of country that are hosting the demo of S.C.A.G. and version 1.0 of Uber Zombie… So they found 2 of our games and are serving those. Actually I would prefer that they linked to this site so we would have 1 download counter per game. I hope those people who downloaded those games enjoyed them as we never received any comments or feedback (plz do so if you like/dislike our games, we appreciate it! – for your convenience you may use our contact form, on which we occasionally receive some messages).

Apparently they host more games then just our games, and they have download counters too!! Why download counters? Well, the more download, the more people like our games… And that is why we make games, to entertain gamers! (And f course for fun). Anyway , .S.C.A.G. was downloaded 17.747 times, which is a lot in our terms, Uber Zombie only 3.773 times (see screenshot). On this site you may not see the download counters, but believe me, they are here!

A short list from our counters (unsorted):

Scag – 73 downloads
Insanity – 14 downloads
NecroSPACE 2 – 97 downloads
NecroSPACE 2 patchv 1.1 – 116 downloads
Uber Chess – 38 downloads
Uber Fighter – 53 downloads
Uber Schraal – 37 downloads
Uber Zombie – 134 downloads
FUR  – 350 downloads

Brazil: http://www.baixaki.com.br/pesquisa_develop.asp?c=28151

Italy: http://www.idealsoftblog.it/2008/09/scag-scrolling-action-game-by-necrosoft.html

Both sites are still linking to our very old site that is doesn’t exist anymore, but fap it into google and she knows the directions!

Paint.net plugin

Some development news, I’m currently working on a Paint.net plugin that can communicate with our game engine. There are some thing I wanted to try like getting and setting a texture via .NET remoting framework. So that is what I did. Currently I can get and set pixels on a texture via between paint.net and out Hell Tech Game Engine. It’s implemented as an effect plugin what means that you need to “click” the effect plugin in order to make it work. Not very user-friendly, but according to Paint.net creators you may not interact with other applications, unless you do not release the plugin…

Further more I also created some other plugins that I may release in the future if people are interested in it. It will be called something like NecroSOFT’s plugin suite or something. Here is a list what I have so far:

  • Patch-based texture synthesis – simple tool to make every texture repeating seamless
  • Flare – just as it says, generates a simple flare over your image, using 2 colors that where selected
  • Explosion – same as flare, but with some noise.

I created those plugins a while ago but never released them and recently I moved them into a brand new project so I only have 1 plugin that I need to copy. Also some plugins share some data which makes life easier when in the same package.

Scag finally released!

Happy newyear to all! and as a surprise we release .S.C.A.G. the full version for free!. More info about .S.C.A.G. can be found here.

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