When I wrote the two-weeks-out post, both cabinets were partially built and I called them "the nail-biter." This is the post about what happened next: the sprint. It mostly happened on a patio table, in a garage, and in whatever hours existed after work. I kept taking photos, partly for this blog and partly because I wasn't sure I'd believe it later.
The workshop, such as it is: a patio table, good weather, and a box of clamps
Starting Point: A Kit, Heavily Modified
I've been open about this part. I didn't design these cabinets from a blank page. I started from a flat-pack specialist's kit. But my goal is always to create an authentic arcade game, not something that merely gestures at one, so I modified things quite a bit. The most visible example: I routed the edges of the main cabinet for T-molding around the case, which is what professional arcade cabinets use. It protects the edges from nicks and dings, important for a machine that travels to venues, and it gives that unmistakable real-arcade finish.
Every panel in these photos (the classic arcade silhouette, the kerf cuts, the speaker vents) spent time on that patio table getting cut, routed, glued, filled, and sanded.
The two cabinets also took different paths, and I've started calling them by version numbers. The alpha cabinet, the first one, is mostly glued together. Solid, but permanent. On the beta cabinet I concentrated on keeping the flat-pack nature the kit promised: the panels are mostly removable, and the entire cabinet can be disassembled. That's the direction everything is heading, because the long-term goal is cabinets that ship flat and go together at a venue with simple tools. That goal is not proven yet; what you're seeing here is the version that had to be standing and working by a hard deadline.
Primer day. Everything gray, everything drying at once
Paint, Then Personality
The cabinets went dark gray, not black, and that was deliberate. Pure black swallows detail; dark gray gives the artwork contrast to pop against and photographs far better. I was thinking about two kinds of photos when I made that call: the wedding photographer's shots, and the product photos you're looking at right now.
Then the part that transforms them: the graphics. I designed and printed full-sized vinyl graphics for the sides and the control panel, made per game, and for the couple's game, per couple. Over the printed control panel goes a plexiglass overlay I cut to fit, protecting the art from a night of enthusiastic button-mashing, exactly the way real arcade machines do it. Watching a dark gray box become Ring Run or Honeymoon Hustle in an afternoon of careful vinyl work is the single most satisfying step of the entire build.
Honeymoon Hustle's control panel, printed crowd art, two joysticks, ready for two players
The Electronics Went In Last
Monitors, joysticks, buttons, wiring, and the Raspberry Pis that run the games all went in after paint. Each game runs completely standalone, no WiFi, nothing to configure at a venue, one standard outlet. That constraint has shaped almost every technical decision in this project, and it paid off immediately: moving a cabinet is stressful enough without also debugging a network.
Not all of it went smoothly. The sound system was the last thing assembled and it was a genuine struggle to get right. I fought ground loop hum for longer than I'd like to admit. And the biggest 4:3 monitors I could find (21-inch) turned out to be a tight, ugly fit in the case. Both of those made the lessons-learned list, which we'll get to.
Screen in, holes drilled, nothing pretty yet, the ugly-duckling stage every cabinet goes through
Two Finished Cabinets
And then, one evening, there they were: two full-height arcade cabinets, art on, screens lit, attract modes running side by side. After months of writing about software builds and design decisions, there was something startling about the physical fact of them. They take up space, they glow, and they look like they belong at a wedding.
First light, both cabinets running in the garage, sawdust still settling
Somewhere mid-sprint. Not shown: the sawdust in everything
The first two people who weren't me played them standing on my porch. I just watched. Two machines I built, running games I made, and the players laughing at each other's near-misses. That thirty seconds justified every late night.
First hands on the finished cabinets
Alpha, Beta… Which Means a Gamma
The next cabinet, gamma, is where the training wheels come off. Instead of buying another company's kit, I'm designing my own from scratch, keeping what worked and fixing the flaws I found in the purchased design. The whole point of gamma is assembly: a cabinet that comes apart and goes back together easily, again and again, because that's what a rental cabinet that ships flat actually has to do.
The hardware punch list is already written, courtesy of everything the sprint taught me:
- ✓ Kill the ground loops. The audio hum gets engineered out from the start instead of chased out at the end.
- ✓ No more USB joystick adapters. They proved unreliable, so the controls will wire directly to the Raspberry Pi instead.
- ✓ A 20-inch monitor instead of 21. I used the largest 4:3 monitors I could find, and they fought the case the whole way. Slightly smaller, much cleaner fit.
- ✓ The plexiglass front glass. It was always in the plan; between the monitor fit issues and the time crunch it didn't make the deadline. Next version, it's in.
And one more thing, purely for the joy of it: coin doors. Nothing says real arcade machine like a coin door, and I want that finishing touch on these cabinets. I'm even exploring making them active. Imagine couples handing out custom printed tokens that guests drop in to play. A wedding favor that starts a game.
Where They Went First
These two cabinets had a date with a wedding, mine. That story gets its own post, because it deserves one. If you're following the build, this blog is where the whole journey lives, and if you're curious what the finished games actually look like, the Ring Run and Honeymoon Hustle pages now have real photos and real gameplay footage, no mockups, no renders.