The following will detail the
conversion/restoration of this cabinet.
BACK
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Started with an empty Fast
Freddie Shell. Now I'm not too critical a guy, but the
game of Fast Freddie was pretty lame, but the cabinet looks
great! To me, that makes this a conversion in the making.
I'm still dedicated to leaving the cabs I make "restorable" so
that someday this cabinet could be converted back to a Fast
Freddie (If someone really wanted to do that). Let's see
how it progresses! |
PERCENT COMPLETE |
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Here's the stripped cabinet
when it arrived at the shop. It needs a little work at the
bottom to repair some water damage, but other than that a great
cabinet, ready for conversion! |
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Sideart is in
good shape. I'll touch up the scratches with color matched
airbrush paint, and it'll be as good as new. |
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cabinet is stripped right out. I have to replace the coin
door, T-molding, back panel, bezel marquee, re-work the control
panel and mount a monitor shelf. Let's take a look at the
process: |
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Control panel when I got it:
Some kind of baseball game, and pretty nasty, a total rework job
here, everything needs to be replaced! |
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There, that's better.
The new panel boasts new Happ arcade quality controls and a
custom vinyl mame underlay protected by a new piece of
Lucite. Much better! |
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The
panel is now wired with a genuine I-pac controller. There
really is no other interface card to use when you want a
flawlessly operating control panel. I've logged a few
hours of Galaga (and other games) on this machine, and it
performs perfectly. I'm very pleased with how this panel
turned out functionally and visually. I've left space to
the right hand side for a possible spinner upgrade (always good
to think of future options!). |
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Here you can
see the new panel with the matching bezel artwork. The
coin door is installed, and wired to the pc power supply (for
those oh-so-cool coin door lights!) The monitor is a 17"
NEC mounted at an angle for easy viewing (and keeping with the
original set-up of the cabinet from its arcade days). I
made a custom black bezel for the gap around the monitor and the
bezel glass, to give it that finished look
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The screen is
nice and bright in the dark. Shown is the Arcade OS
frontend showing the list of 3000+ games available. With
the P2 series PC that I installed here, this cabinet will play
most games up to about 1998. Later games require much more
horsepower (and I much prefer the classics anyways!)
Onboard is a P2 400 with a 7 gig HD and 128meg of Ram.
Video is from a Trident AGP card, which is perfect because of
it's power and built in vesa modes (perfect for DMAME).
The beauty of these cabinets is of course that you can simply
unplug this computer and plug in a new one some time in the
future, when more powerful PCs are cheaper. |
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The
instruction card above the control panel gives quick info. |
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 Here
is the back of the cab when I started, and the following
pictures show the new back panel and the juicy insides of this
reborn beast!
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Back panel... |
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The
components are held in place with steel strapping. The wires
are held together with this totally cool tape I found that only
sticks to itself. No more gooey messes when you want to
change around the wires! Very neat and very secure, the
strapping can be unscrewed to allow access to the system.
The I-pac is mounted just above the coin door, and new
keyed-alike locks are installed. The only thing left is to
install the external power switch and power bar that everything
will plug into. |
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