A tablesaw was used to cut angles on the ends of the middle pieces so they’d fit together nicely. I used only a few angles in the design, 45 for the front slopes, 6 for the controls and 15 for the screen/speakers/top of unit. Here you can see the grooves for the middle pieces. This allows a person (or rather 2 people as each half is still heavy) to lift the pieces apart and move it a good deal easier than a whole cabinet would be. See the idea is the cabinet is in two pieces, upper and lower. Unfortunately the beer consumption caused a few errors in the bottom of the case, though none are apparent in the final product (fixed the day after)
Here’s the bottom of the cabinet, and me opening a can of MGD with a compound miter ruler thing. I then piled all the pieces in the back of my friend’s vintage 1989 Ford Ranger truck (which still has at least 10% of its original side panels and windows) and drove it all to The Barn for assembly. (Photo unavailable as I took it with my camera phone and it looks like fish-eyed wide-angle crap) I used Greeley’s big CNC machine for this, entire 4’x8′ panels can be cut at once! I ended up using 1.5 sheets of 1/2″ (middles) and 1.5 sheets of 3/4″ (sides) The solution was a darker shade of red and gradiations into black, to mute the overal “brightness” of the red. Red is the typical Neo Geo color but it’s kind of gaudy. Originally I planned to have the cabinet be all woodgrain (oak plywood) but when I did a layout like that I hated it. I designed the cabinet to be assembled like cheap furniture from Target (um, not that I own any of course!) Channels/grooves would be routed in the side panels and the middle panels (really technical names, eh?) would slide into these grooves and be wood glued / nailed in place. This Neo Geo, on the other hand, was just for me! (HA HA HA HA HA HA!) Therefore the control height was designed for someone 5’8″ and the 4 action buttons were laid out to match the spacing of my fingers. I design and build a lot of videogame-related stuff but sell almost all of it. With “Top” and “Bottom” labeled, apparently in case I accidently designed this standing on my head. Not owning Autocad I booted up old Adobe Illustrator 10 and went to town! I didn’t see why this would be any different than the portables I design, just a lot bigger and well, not portable.
#Snk arcade machine portable
Still more years passed… then my lucky day! Someone saw my site and wanted a Neo Geo Portable – and they offered me something I couldn’t refuse, an arcade monitor! Thanking my lucky stars I said yes and promptly began designing my Neo Geo MVS Arcade Machine! Still it was fun, even if I had to rub wires together to “insert coin” I could play it on a 1986 model Commodore Amiga monitor, which I believe was a whopping 12 inches in size. “That sure puts the Neo in Geo!” In the following years Neo Geo emulators came out and I was able to relive some of the glory days of the system, while playing stuff I’d never seen in the arcades (like the awesome Neo Turf Masters and of course the Slug series)įinally in 2002 I broke down and bought myself a 6 slot Neo Geo arcade motherboard, controls and some games. “Wow the Neo Geo has new games?” I thought. He had it for the Saturn but said it came from the Neo Geo. Years passed… A friend of mine introduced me to Metal Slug. Probably the last Neo I saw in an arcade was in 1996 when I was filming helicopters in Wisconsin Dells on the 4th of July. As the years passed I played Neo Geo arcades whenever I could, Samurai Showdown, the kind of weak World Heroes, etc. So from then on my dream was to own a Neo Geo! The home system was a LOT of money back then, like $500 or so, and it was certainly out of my reach. The actual ad, found during an archaeological expedition in a warehouse slated for destruction. (The Nintendo, being 8-bit, was something along the lines of a wilted, sat-in-the-case-all-day gas station dog) So yeah, I knew the system was supposed to kick butt (or at least taste good) and upon playing one found it to be true! Specifically the one where a Genesis was represented by a plain hot dog whilst the Neo Geo was this overloaded Coney Island-esque cardiac-arrest-on-a-bun monstrosity. Naturally being a die-hard EGM reader I remembered all the ads for the Neo Geo. And they had a Neo Geo machine with I think Magician Lord, Baseball Stars, Nam 1975 and The Super Spy. Anyway since 80% of high school consists of goofing off we were all in the student commons area. Some sort of parade or something, I was there for high school band. It was the fall of 1990 at the university of Platteville Wisconsin. You know I really like beer but I think my overall brain cel count is OK because I can still remember the first time I played a Neo Geo arcade machine.
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