Turning Original XBOX into Arcade Machine

So I bought an old JAMMA arcade cabinet. JAMMA is a standard interconnect so that you can take a generic cabinet with monitor and control panel, and plug different games into it. Arcade owners benefitted by only needing to buy new PCBs instead of entire new consoles when they wanted to change games.

My initial idea when I bought an arcade cabinet was to put an old XBOX in there, get rid of all the existing wiring & monitor, and drop in the xbox. For controls I was going to hand-wire the arcade buttons to my existing xbox controllers. This has a few problems:

• The monitor. I was going to have to hack into place a TV. This was probably going to be ugly at best, and dangerous at worst.
• The controls. Hand soldering to the tiny controller pads? That wouldn't take a good bashing & kicking an arcade machine should be able to take while grinning.

In other words: bad solution. If you want to put an XBOX into a JAMMA cabinet it looks like your best solution is to wire up your controls to the JAMMA cab in a standard fashion and then get a XBOX to JAMMA adapter. Now you have a standard JAMMA cab that could still play other PCBs if you bought them, and a MAME box! Best of both worlds!

I don't think I'm going to do this though. My cabinet has a vertical monitor and while it'll lack the 2-player games, I think I'm going to go with the 60-in-1 classic games. It's emulated ROMs but provides a ton of classic gaming.

Your Quest: Cheapest MAME cabinet: Part 1, decisions.

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NOTE: While this is probably the cheapest way to a MAME interface, I ended up with getting a simpler J-PAC for wiring.  Read my post about configuring Ubuntu to run inside the an arcade cab here!

I'm possibly buying a house soon. Naturally, the first thing on my mind is putting a stand-up arcade machine in the place. While I ended up buying a proper JAMMA cabinet, this post describes my original plan to build a MAME cabinet.

Requirements

• Stand-up. No bar-top machines
• Two-player, only interact via arcade buttons & joystick
• Should support NES, SNES, SEGA, and old-school MAME titles

Cabinet

Choice	Price	Pros	Cons
JAMMA Cabinet (used)	$200?	Comes with buttons,speakers,screen	Hard to find, heavy to ship, custom monitor
DIY MDF Cabinet	$100-$150 inc. buttons	Can make lighter, smaller, thinner	More work, need to paint & trim, need buttons

Winner? Lets go with DIY / MDF.

Buttons

For buttons, I was originally going to go with a la carte parts from SparkFun until I ran into this ebay deal: 2 joysticks & 14 buttons for $34 + shipping! Much cheaper!

But how to wire up the buttons / joystick? Depends on our choice of brain.

Brain

For the brain I have 3 free choices: XBOX, Wii, or old PC. While software-wise they could be considered equivalent I am tempted to sell my Xbox, keep the Wii on the TV, and use an old PC. More on this decision later.

System	Method	Pros	Cons
PC	Hard-soldered to a USB keyboard	will be cheap	Lots of fine solder work to do
XBOX	hand-soldered to two xbox contollers	FREE!	Again, lots of fine, custom, solder work to do. If it breaks then I have to go in and fix by hand.
Wii	Arduino-based classic controller emulation	Most elegant solution	Even more DIY work, most expensive, have to hack wired power to wiimotes

Since I have a purposeless xbox, and plenty controllers, maybe that's the best bet? The work will be to wire up all the buttons to ripped apart controllers, then pack it all into a box and expose the wires with a nice little screw-post connector.

7 buttons per controller gives me, looking at an xbox controller, all I need.

- Almost all the digital buttons & D-Pad. I guess I can live without "Back" and just with "Start". That's actually perfect.

I think I will go with 6 buttons + 1 1p/2p button each player. That works for SNES and SEGA as well as the lesser MAME arcade games as well. Excellent!

Still to be determined: Screen, speakers, painting, etc, etc. However it is exciting to think the current total cost is around $50 + MDF/screws.