I have considered doing this from scratch but not a 'on size fits all' design.
I looked at doing a cabinet for a specific machine, in my case it would have been MPU3 Auto Route.
I would have used an existing cabinet and buttons and two TFT monitors to replace the glasses. I didn't get as far as working out whether there are monitors available which would fit exactly, but I assumed it would be possible to make something fit with some modification. I wouldn't have needed touch screens as all the game play would have been through the original buttons.
I wanted to utilise the coin mechs which I thought could have been achieved through an Ipac. The payout would have been needed a pulse from the emulator which could have been directed to the solenoids using relays and the existing machine power supply.
I had it worked out in my head as I did when I built a real machine from scratch, I thought it could be done.
So why didn't I do it?
I don't know how to do layouts and I wasn't sure how much work would be involved in splitting the emulated machine into the two glass (monitor) configuration I needed. So I just put the idea on the back burner for a while until a thread like this came up.
For 'a one cabinet fits all design', I think to be commercially viable you would just use one large 40 inch monitor and incorporate all the buttons as the touch screen element within the game. I think if you try and use real buttons, it would end up looking stupid due to the huge number of button configurations used on all machine types. You'd have to rewrite all the layouts for it which would probably mean many wouldn't be available at least initially. Who would be interested in redesigning layouts for a machine they did not own?
Cost would run to at least £1000 after VAT so it would have a limited market especially if it wasn't supplied with any working games (due to copyright)
Also, for me, it would have to accept and pay coins, so as far as the legal side of things is concerned, it would have to be sold as gaming device which opens up a whole new can of worms.
Probably the software is the biggest hurdle here, I would have thought?
Paul
Edited by booze.net, 23 March 2014 - 10:21 AM.
