Mala Frontend Layout

Found this site, http://malafe.net/

check out the Layouts for examples. Some very nice ready to download or to give inspiration to create one yourself.

My favorite so far:  the Mameroom

Almost finished

The end result! What fun it was to create this. There are a few things left to make it 100%

- The bezel exists of 4 seperate pieces mounted together, this will be replaced by one piece of wood using a router. But this takes some practice and maybe a router table to make it easy.
- To Power up the system you have to remove the backdoor and push the original pc switch. It's cooler to have the switch at the back, not such a problem to fix.
-Clean up the wires inside the cabinet. Lot's of loose cables have to be tight together.

-Create a MAME fronted. Í'm still a bit in doubt wich one to use. Hyperspin looks great but it's a bit too much. Not running so smooth on this setup. MALA and Maximun Arcade look promising. I'm not realy interested in the other emulators, only MAME.  An article about this will be written in the blog if i spent some more time on this!

The backdoor. What to tell ;) The 2 green buttons at the top left are on this foto not mounted correctly yet. They are pushed back in the wood now. The function of these are TEST SW and SERVICE SW, meant for original PCB'S.

I read somewhere a tip to place a black&white print behind the color print to protect the darkcolors from being over-lighted. Tried this but it blurred the whole picture. Now it's very bright, with the disadvantage of the dark parts over-lighted. The Marquee is printed on a high quality laserprinter on normal paper. A wish for me is to order the same picture at quality material, like they do at gameongrafix etc. On the wishlist!

The plexi was cut with the smallest jigsaw blade available in the local store. It's a 1-2mm metal blade. They normally cut anti-skid board with it for instance.
Worked well. Cut a medium speed, not to slow and fast or it will break/melt.

The Arcade powered on! My son playing Sega Hang-On. He likes the race games. Enduro Racer, Crazy Race, Outrun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuYRR6E8Dw

Painting

After the sanding and putty prepartion on the wood 2 layers of primer were done.
Last week I painted the cabinet totally black but was really not pleased at all with the result. It looked to 'hard' for a kids room. So I decided to get rid of the black on the side of the cabinet, prime it once more and paint it with a orange tone matching the side art stickers color scheme (see previous blog post)

In total 3 ground layers and 3 color layers.

paint details:
side: Histor Satin flexa colors e3.35.72
kickplate: Histor Satin black 6372

 

Marquee preparation

Look here the preparation of the marquee. The TL is from the kitchen, we have a kitchen that is 15 years old falling apart. 

The TL has a new purpose!

2 speaker grills get mounted. The holes are drilled with a special hole drill. I experienced you have to slowly presure the drill and increase speed slow for maximum result. To much preasure and the drill gets stuck.