What can I say, I am a child of the video game revolution. I spent countless hours, and quarters, playing such arcade hits as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Jungle and Tron, and more.

A couple years ago I discovered Mame and I felt like I had a poket full of quarters and was heading for the arcade(PacMan Fever). What better way to experience the old school arcade style then with an old school arcade style control? Exactally, build your own.

Sure you can go out and get a HotRod controller or and X-Arcade controller. You will spend anywhere between $160-$200 for the unit and another $30 to get it shipped to you(these things are somewhat heavy). But I wanted to be able to add buttons or make my own configuration.

All-in-all, I spent about $50 to build my first controller.

• $5.00 piece of high-density press board
• $40 from Happ Controlls
  • 2 Ultimate Joysticks
  • 12 Black Pushbuttons
  • 4 White Pushbuttons
  • 4 Red Pushbuttons
• About $5 in misc. hardware

So, I sat down and used TurboCAD Lite to come up with the plans. Below was the plans I used to build the controller.

Step 2 was to cut the press board to make a 2' x 1' tabletop, measure and mark where the buttons and joysticks will be placed, and use a 1 1/8 hole cutter to make holes for the buttons and sticks.

Once I finished cutting all the holes, I mounted all the hardware. The pictures to the left and right show what the control looked like once the hardware was mounted (left-front/right-back).

Now comes the fun part; the running of the wires. I have choosen to do the keyboard hack since a keyboard costs about $7-$12 for a cheap one and I could not find a controller under $50. I got this controler out of a pretty decent Keytronic key board I had sitting around (although on the PCB it says Honeywell).

More pictures to come

To the right is my original Mame machine. It is a Pentium 233 MMX w/ 128mb ram, 7gb HD, 32x CD-Rom and a Rage3d PCI video card with 16mb ram. This machine is a little slow with some of the more modern games, so I am upgrading it to a AMD K6-2 450 with 256mb ram, 17gb HD, same cd rom, and a nVidia GeForce2 Mx with 32mb ram. Pictures to come soon.