New VH5150 Inspired Arcade Cab Makeover 
My nephew Kollyn, and Brother-in-law, Brian had a terrific time on their vacation breathing new life into an old arcade cabinet.
I have been into the home arcade hobby for a couple of years now, and I wanted to pass along some retrogaming good cheer to my nephew and his family. They had never done an arcade project, but both his parents are former Navy ETs and his dad is an Engineer at Boeng, so they know their way around wires and circuit boards!
The cab was red and Kollyn and Brian striped it with electrical tape. The logo is inspired by the Kramer Logo, and is especially close to our hearts as the logo on the neck of the legendary 5150 guitar by Eddie Van Halen.
Christened, "GAMER Arcade" on August 5, 2006. Brian, Kollyn and I are all guitar players, and love games, so a marriage of the two was inevitable.
The cab was originally purchased in Oshawa, ON., at a junk yard--er, Salvage Facility, and I brought it with me to Jersey when we moved last summer. The game was a working Mortal Kombat machine, from which we removed all the boards, controls, power and monitor.
Brian and Kollyn did an
awesome job of ripping everything out and cleaning up the cab. When I got it, it had been sitting under a tarp in the weather for weeks, and it was already starting to swell at the bottom, the T-Molding was come up the first 3-4 inches, but it still looks good, and the red was not bubbling.
They decided to use the red back panel to create a new control surface with enough room for a spinner and trackball down the road. We had just enough red from the back and the control hole cut into the bottom back to make the new panel.
Kollyn did all the wiring himself, along with some expert advise from Dad, and Uncle.
We used a GroovyGameGear GPWiz game pad encoder and Joy2Key to generate the keypresses for MAME.
Everything works on the cab, coin door, everything.
We even loaded up some classic Halen to put 'er through her paces.
The reworked control panel was an interesting piece of retro-engineering. The original cabinet had a sliding shelf that attached to the control panel, and was the mounting surface for the motherboard and video board and power supply. We repurposed that board for a new monitor shelf, using 1x2's as shelf supports.
Brian then built a control panel floor with a piece of oak ply and adjusted the angle of the support blocks to accomodate the new control panel angle. We routed the bottom, side pieces and top for black T-Molding and installed it. 1/16th slot cutting bit from Lowes was $14! The Tmolding is so incredible, it makes it look so professional.
We also loved the way the black molding went perfectly with the red, black, white stripe motif.
Here is a close up of the CP top and bottom:
