I'm not above using a bit of trickery to accomplish #1 & #2. I want this to look like it was locked away for years from prying eyes and is now being released into the wild. It's going to be black, with sparsely stenciled sides. I want the game to look dark and ominous. This is supposed to be a machine that drove people crazy. I even have a faux City of Portland Tax Sticker I'm going to put on it. The plan for it is to come across as an artifact. I want to use the original T-molding, beat up (but functional) buttons and joysticks, and so on and so forth. That means no highfaluting LCD, light up buttons, 5.1 digital sound, etc. I wanted the machine to look like it's been pulled out of a warehouse after 30 years. So in the design for the cab, for the final product, I had a few design rules that decided to hold fast to: I threw a PC CRT and a computer in it was be done. It's a great classic shape, too, so I said yeah. ![]() The box had been sanded flat and painted white, and although it had some termite issues, the body was in great shape. I hit up a buddy for a cab and got a gutted, converted Stern cab to use. I'm more interested in presentation and atmosphere, though, so that's what I'm going to be hitting. There are a few sites dedicated to it, and someone even wrote a game, which will be the basis of the electronics of the cab. I love the story behind it - the paranoia, the men in black, the game that drives you to the edge of insanity. Polybius, the holy grail of arcade urban legends I contacted the ZapCon organizer, and he gave me his blessing, and so I decided to go for it. I liked the whole vibe of having "Mythical Cabinets that Didn't Exist In Real Life" at the show, and it reminded me of something I had always wanted to tackle. In the mean time, it got my wheels spinning. ![]() They ended up not needing the machine, but then the owners of Starfighters Arcade here in town asked about the same computer, as they wanted to use it to build a replica "Starfighter" cabinet from the movie for ZapCon. I thought it was a great idea, and I was intrigued. A few months ago the ZapCon organizers reached out to me about getting a PC for a "Space Paranoids" cabinet they were planning to build for ZapCon.
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