For years I've thought that having my own arcade cabinet would be great, but without the room to hold one I never did anything about it. Then back in late 2005 I was watching Hak5 (awesome show), specifically episode 1x04 on which they had a "Building a mini arcade cabinet for under $100" segment. That's when I decided that I didn't need a whole cabinet, just a controller that I could use with MAME. I already had a MythTV box setup which would work great for this with the MythGame plugin. So many hours of googling later I had my plan all set out for building one.
After the construction was done and I had a working arcade controller, it stayed as plain MDF board for several weeks. For a while I was just going to spray the thing all gloss black, but after giving it some more thought I figured that if I did that then I should have just gone out and brought a pre-built controller in the first place.
I spent many more hours scouring the web for picutres of arcade cabinets and controller art for ideas to use to decorate my boring plain controller. Several plans later and I had choosen to based my whole design on my favorate arcade button mashing series of games Metal Slug. The artwork of Metal Slug is just amazing, the detail that is put in to every game is really astounding. So I got to work painting and 8 months later (with many weeks in between of not doing any work on it at all, damn I can be lazy busy sometimes) I have what you see here.
