The Black Box, still a work in progress - functional yet unpainted.
Outline
This is a arcade machine with a little bit of a difference - instead of being a large cabinet that takes up half a room, i decided to attemp a small, portable arcade box. Built with the same methodology as a MAME cabinet but on a small scale. Not only is it small, it folds up to form a breifcase of sorts - protecting the buttons, joystick and screen withing itself. This is the sort of arcade machine you can turn up to a part to, find a table and plug into a wall socket and off you go.
This machine is capable of playing nearly 30 different consoles (including arcade and pinball), and also has a small jukebox for playing music - just perfect for parties!
The name comes from Black Box phreaking popular in the 60's and 70's.
Current Status
Currently, the Black Box is being sanded and painted. It was assembled and tested to ensure everything worked, fitted and there was no large issues. This stage was dangerous however, as all time put aside to work on it ended up with 5 minutes of 'work' along with 3 hours of 'lets just test a few games'.
However, I had to man up, and as hard as it was to dissasemble it for painting, it had to be done.
Features
- Fold up and portable - only requires to be plugged into a wall socket
- Compact design - 400x430x225 folded up
- Plays nearly 30 different consoles/computers - SNES, NES, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, DOS games, Gameboy, etc.
- Plays Arcade games (up to a point, doesnt have the CPU horsepower to play anything past about 1995)
- Real arcade buttons and joystick
- Plays pinball virtulizations
- Music player
- Running off a micro-atx motherboard with WinXP
- To come: Solid-State Harddrive (waiting for them to bloody well come down in price)
- Small control panel with Sound Output, USB, etc
