MORTAL KOMBAT!!

Well that sure took long enough!  Project Beta was my painstakingly slow conversion of a classic arcade cabinet into an all-in-one, 8000+ game MAME unit.  Lots of people have heartbreakingly gutted great classic machines for the MAME route, but as I don’t really like baseball whatsoever, the Relief Pitcher which was originally in the cabinet was no great loss.  I still carefully took out everything, including the Pac-Man burned in screen, just in case it might find a new home down the road.

The Original

The price was right, the dream was there and I slowly began to assemble the parts for this project which I’d purchased months earlier.  I decided that with my classic Apple logo color-themed X-Arcade unit, it might be neat to create a fictitious 1980s-style Apple cabinet, and so I got to work on the artwork and began planning the control panel’s reassembly.

Disassembler

Label Time

Slice Em' Up

Finished CPO

With the CPO done I moved onto the cabinet.  I stripped the paint off, only to discover to my horror that instead of being a Relief Pitcher machine all its life (the Williams coin box should’ve tipped me off), it may very well have had a life as a Defender cabinet at some point…but unfortunately the damage had been done by the previous conversion, else I would’ve been tempted to bring the Defender back from the dead, instead of sanding, priming and painting the cab a nice semi-gloss black.

Deplorable Defender Desecration!

Paint it up!

So when all was said and done, I couldn’t quite remove all the horrible Relief Pitcher side art, but I can now enjoy a reasonably awesome arcade cabinet from my own living room.

Originlol

The next step, of course, is to replace the X-Arcade control panel with a nice, plexiglass topped flush-mount one, and in fact two as I’ve planned on swappable American and Japanese style control panels depending on what game I’m playing.  This is more of a nitpicky thing, but it will be a nice finishing touch (and I’m hoping I’ll find some way to peel off the last bits of baseball art by then too).  In the meantime though, I’m super happy with how everything’s set up and am now working on getting a 100% complete ROM collection for the current version of MAME.  Not that I play more than a dozen or so games, but it’s the perfectionist in me!

Merry Christmapple

So there you have it, completed on Christmas Eve, a few hours ahead of schedule – my very own arcade unit.  Project Beta, in its current incarnation at any rate, complete.  Feels good, man.

More than three quarters complete of the fantastic Project Beta…some very strange little bits to finish up, but gazing over at the nearly complete mastwork, I have to smile.  I originally thought it would take me until Christmas to have it ready, but I’m thinking if I play my cards right, and if I make a trip to a certain pet shop next week, I may very well have it wrapped up by the end of November.  Which would mean I could begin enjoying it all the sooner.

Greetings secret project followers….I was sick for awhile, and unfortunately my computer needed to be re-formatted and so I’m running behind in the old updates department.  Needless to say however there have been some pretty BIG developments with project beta…hopefully I’ll have the reveal video for you shortly!

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