Hellooooooo!
Richard, aka Budget Guitarist, here. Long suffering fans of this site are aware that sometimes I disappear for weeks, only to reappear at some random date. Well, here I am!
I wanted to show you why I’ve been absent for over a month. The best I can do is the big featured image for this post. I made a home arcade cabinet. I’ve stocked it up with a handful of the best classic arcade games (Burgertime and Galaga being my two favorites,) as well as a good collection of NES and SNES games. Here’s a view of the control panel:
That photo is a little dark so that you can see the LED buttons.
If you’re curious, that’s a game called Mappy on the screen.
The MacLeCade has two joysticks and 8 buttons for each player, so you can config it to play most arcade and NES and SNES games, but for the NES and SNES I usually use a classic iBuffalo USB game controller.
I’m running this from an old 7 and a half year old Mac Mini right now, going into an old Dell flat screen monitor. Eventually I plan on replacing the old Mac with a Raspberry Pi 3 running Retrocade. But for now, the Mac Mini works just fine.
What does this have to do with guitars? Nothing! Nothing at all. I grew up going to arcades and loving them, and the Internet inspired me to make one of these. I had a blast making it. It’s basically a kit you can buy from Game Room Solutions. If you’re interested in doing this, please take my advice – just go to Game Room Solutions and get your items there. I’m not getting a cut or anything like that – I spent hours and hours and hours looking at all of the various parts you need to build this thing from all of the different websites, and in the end I went with Game Room Solutions as my one stop shop. It’s well worth it to buy everything from one place, because that way you know everything will fit together correctly.
It’s not cheap. But you can do what I did – you can order the parts over time. The big initial purchase is the cabinet kit, which is around $220. All of the other individual parts are less than that. The only thing you can’t get from Game Room Solutions is the monitor, but they’ve got advice on the best way to find a good one for use in their cabinet. The guy who runs the place is Ryan, and you can email him with any questions you have. I wanted to buy something not listed on the site and he generated a special purchase order for me.
Some of you are saying “I didn’t come here to read about arcade machines.” I know that. But it’d been too long since I’d posted anything, so I felt the need to explain. In addition to building the MacLeCade, I’ve also been learning Gamemaker Studio 2. My kids an I are making an RPG video game, which will one day be released on Steam, XBox One, and Nintendo Switch. And by “one day” I mean maybe a year or two from now.
I still love guitars. I still play every day. I will still blog here. I’m in it for the long haul. But I may blog about non-guitar related stuff from time to time, if I think the topic is interesting enough.
As always, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it very much!
