A custom arcade

Here's a more complete photo of the build. I plan on doing some better cable management at the bottom of the machine soon, but this displays the completed physical build. I don't particularly have a build guide as I improvised and made most of the design up as I went along.

The frame is primarily made from C-Beam aluminum extrusions, with 20x20 V-Slot extrusions as seen in the back for support and to reduce and wobbling.

The two upright 1500mm C-Beams have 3 500mm C-Beams mounted horizontally, to which I have mounted a small computer, an adjustable arm mount for the monitor allowing me to quickly switch between horizontal and vertical games easily. The shape of the C-Beams allowed me to easily hide the majority of the cables that for the monitor, speaker bar, and control panel. The speaker bar is held in place by 3D printed brackets, and I put two small holes in the computer case to allow that to simply hang from 2 M5 bolts with T-nuts in the extrusion's channels.



The control panel itself is made from layers of laser cut acrylic, held apart by more C-Beam extrusion and some 20x20 V-slot extrusion to support the corners There are also two, flip-down, plastic cup holders that were incredibly easy to mount to the extrusion across the front of the panel.



The panel itself is mounted on 2 more 250mm C-Beam arms. It's held at an angle by 4 3D printed mounts, and only uses 1 USB port. It can be lifted off to be used as a game-pad on any computer.



This was a "quarantine" and was extremely fun to build. I chose aluminum extrusions for a number of reasons. I'm also working on a yet-to-be complete CNC mill and found the extrusions to be a light-weight but strong and versatile building material. I wanted to build this with as little need for power tools as possible, and beyond cutting the two 20x20 V-slot bars for the panel, built this from completely stock lengths readily available. Due to it being so lightweight, I can still move the entire thing myself without assistance, which is not something you can say for a classic full sized arcade cabinet, and I personally love the modern look I ended up with.