Created by Rasmus Konig Sorenson, the Nanocade is the perfect netbook upgrade, turning your compact PC into a full-fledged mini arcade system. Actually, Rasmus built the first one with a Mini ITX board and a 10″ LCD monitor inside, but says a netbook would work perfectly too (although I’m betting you’d need to separate the screen from the keyboard portion to make it fit). The cabinet comes in kit form, and definitely looks like it would take some work to assemble, but the completed prototype sure looks swell.

When fully outfitted, the Nanocade has real arcade quality buttons and a joystick, and once connected to a netbook loaded up with MAME, you’ll be able to play just about any arcade game you want. The only real downside I see to the Nanocade is that the cabinet itself will cost $300 bucks, and then you still have to buy the joystick and buttons making it more costly than most netbooks themselves.

Oh well, I guess I could always just get one of these and call it a day.

[via The Red Ferret Journal]

Sure, modder Simon Jansen probably had to do away with the TARDIS’ time-travel abilities in order to make way for all the arcade parts, but the end result is more than worth it.

The thing I really love about this build is that it looks just like the police call box from the show, but when you open it up, a complete set of arcade controls folds out. And not only do you get authentic arcade buttons, joysticks and a trackball, it’s designed to look like the controls inside Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

Wanna see how he did it? Check out the complete TARDIS MAME project here.

[via Geek Crafts]

It plays games! It plays music! It’s equipped with Edison electric light, so don’t try to use a match on it! That’s what the warning label says, anyway, and it seems like sound advice. Though it’s always tempting to torch Frankenstein’s monster.

Dedicated builder Doug Haffner has documented the entire experience on a website, and if you want to watch a great deal of Lost – that’s apparently how he kept himself entertained whilst carving and fitting – you too can produce your own monster arcade machine.

[via Geeky Gadgets]

Mac modder Napes took an original bondi blue iMac, built it into a custom cocktail-format arcade cabinet, and transformed it into a full-fledged arcade gaming system. Thanks to the scan lines on the iMac’s bubbly 15″ color CRT, it’s the perfect display for that retro arcade feel.

The arcadiMac runs on a 233MHz PowerPC 750 (G3) processor, which may not seem like much by today’s standards, but it’s plenty powerful to run most classic arcade games (other then NEOGEO) using MacMame emulator software.

To get all the real arcade buttons and joysticks to work with the iMac, Napes wired them through an iPac USB controller interface, and set up all the key mappings with QuickKeys. The total cost for the entire project was under $200 bucks (plus several months of blood, sweat and tears).

Ready to build your own arcadiMac? Napes plans on posting a build guide over on MacMod so you can make one for yourself.

UK custom furniture maker Surface Tension handcrafts each one of these arcade gaming systems to order. Each table is made from metal and glass, and conceals a reasonably fast PC and a 19″ LCD flat screen under the hood. They come complete with two sets of real arcade controls, as well as a HAPP trackball with wicked blue backlighting. The systems are powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 1GB of RAM, 160GB of storage and Wi-Fi connectivity. They even pre-load iTunes and throw in an Apple Airport Express you can stream tunes to your stereo wirelessly.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The systems come preloaded with a 29 game collection called Taito Legends, but they’re also set up to run MAME out of the box. Just install your ROMs, artwork and samples, and you’re ready to get your arcade game on. Surface Tension also throws in menu system for easily accessing games. Plus, it’s a fully-functional Windows PC, so you can also play Windows games and surf the web and check e-mail too.

All this style and substance do come at a price though. The systems cost £3299 each (appx. $6600 USD), but if you happen to live in the UK, they’ll deliver and set it up for you for free.

[via CribCandy]

While there’s not a whole lot new going on here, the GP2X F-200 Game System updates the portable by adding a touch-sensitive screen and a totally overhauled game controller. The console will come pre-loaded with a handful of homebrew games, but can easily be loaded up with emulators like MAME and GNGeo among others. One (hopefully) major improvement over older models is an upgrade of the crummy joystick to a 8-way digital D-Pad. They also updated the user interface and you can now multi-task, so you can play music while using other applications like the e-book reader. But who are we kidding, GP2X has always been about playing games.

Expect the new GP2X model to be released this October. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s likely to be around $200 or less. Play-Asia will be carrying the consoles once they’re available.

For those of you living under a rock, MAME is the Multiple Machine Arcade Emulator, the de facto, gold-standard for playing classic arcade games. While the initial port runs slowly, I’m sure optimizations will be done over time to let the iPhone play your arcade favorites at a reasonably accurate speed. The developer claims that some simpler games like Pac-man and Q*bert run at close to normal speeds, while many games don’t perform so well yet, even with frame-skipping on and sound disabled.

As is the case with all homebrew iPhone applications, you’ll have to do a bit of work to get it up and running on your phone. For those of you who know your way around a compiler, you can pick up the full source code and read more about the emulator over on Google Code.

[via MAKE]

Let me start off by saying that the Tankstick is a one mammoth controller. It’s meant for serious arcade game fiends, and those who just have to have the biggest toys on the block.

First and foremost, the Tankstick is designed with PC gaming in mind, with a definitive bent towards those who like to play arcade and console emulators. There are adapters available so you can use the Tankstick with any console, but since these are optional, I didn’t get to try out the controller on my Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii.

I knew I was in for something special when this giant box showed up on my doorstep. Packed neatly inside, the controller is a whopping 30-inches wide, and weighs in at about 20 pounds.

While you certainly can play with the Tankstick in your lap, its really way too big for anything but desktop or countertop placement. Build quality of the Tankstick is exceptional. It’s made from heavy duty arcade-grade materials, and includes real arcade joysticks, buttons and a full-size trackball.

The Tankstick features dual eight-way digital joysticks and eight buttons per player. This setup lets you play pretty much any arcade game ever made (other than games that demand a spinner or a wheel input.) The dual stick design works extremely well for classics like Smash TV and Crazy Climber, which both used two sticks in their original arcade incarnations. With dual controls and a name like Tankstick, the first game to pop into my mind was BattleZone. I was really looking forward to that one, only to find it virtually unplayable, due to the lack of any button or trigger directly on the joysticks. Regardless, pretty much any other joystick-based game I tried played just like it did in the arcade. The dual stick design is also really nice for two player games, assuming you put the controller on a hard surface instead of your lap.

Joystick and button responsiveness is excellent, and everything feels like the “real deal” here. In addition to the dual sticks and buttons, the controller features four side mounted buttons, which can be used for functions such as pinball-flipper games, or for coin-in triggering. There are also player one/player two start buttons, which each have nifty people symbols on them (oh the little touches!)

Setup was a bit more challenging than I’d prefer, but since this controller is really geared towards techie types, I won’t hold it against X-Arcade too much. The Tankstick comes with both USB and PS/2 interfaces, and all the cables you need to hook it up to your PC. You’ll need to make sure you have two available ports for this controller. One cable connects to the trackball, and the other one connects the joysticks and buttons. Once connected, I decided to give it a whirl with my install of M.A.M.E., the leading classic arcade emulator.

Since all of the digital functions are designed to emulate keystrokes, mapping keys to buttons is pretty straightforward, but can be time consuming. Thankfully, there’s already a configuration built into M.A.M.E. for X-Arcade’s sticks, making it fairly painless to get up and running (assuming you read manuals.) On the other hand, I had a heck of a time getting M.A.M.E. to recognize the trackball. After a bit of research, it turns out that the more recent versions of that emulator can support multiple analog devices, and I had to manually edit my configurations to get it to use the trackball instead of a mouse.

Once I worked out the trackball kinks, though, I was hooked. Classics like Marble Madness, Centipede and Crystal Castles all thrive on trackball play, and with the Tankstick’s full-sized orb, it felt so good to play those classics the way they were meant to be played.

I’ve spent alot of time talking about how well the Tankstick works with classic arcade games. Heck, X-Arcade even includes a handful of arcade games from Atari and Midway on two included CDs (real gaming snobs won’t settle for less than the original arcade versions under M.A.M.E., though.) However, since all of the controller’s buttons and joystick contacts are user-programmable, you can use the Tankstick with just about any PC game, as long as it can use the keyboard and mouse. I was even able to get the Tankstick working with Half Life 2, but I’m pretty old school when it comes to playing first-person shooters, so it felt awkward to me.

At $199.95, the X-Arcade Tankstick isn’t for everyone. It’s a massive piece of equipment and a bit challenging to set up at first. Its built like a tank, so unless you plan on dropping it on the floor, you get years of gameplay out of it. For serious arcade enthusiasts, it’s about as close as you’ll get to the real arcade without dropping thousands on a full-size arcade cabinet.

Technabob Review Scores
Functionality:
9 out of 10

Build Quality:
10 out of 10

Ease of Use:
6 out of 10

Value:
8.5 out of 10

Overall Score:
8.5 out of 10

The system features a 100-inch diagonal screen and a 2000 lumen DLP front projector, running at 1024×768 (XGA) resolution. An Athlon 64 CPU powers the arcade emulator PC. A full arcade control panel with authentic arcade joysticks, countless buttons, a spinner, lighted trackball and even a light gun. The system ships with tons of titles from Atari, Midway, Namco, Capcom and some classic Laserdisc games from Digital Leisure (Dragons Lair I, II and Space Ace). Additional games can also be installed on the system using the pre-installed MAME32 emulator.

As an added bonus, the system is a fully-functional home theater and music jukebox. The system is being offered at an introductory price of $4499 USD, which is $500 under the final price. While you could probably throw together your own MAME box with a projector and screen for a bit less, this system is pre-configured and ready to go, plus you get technical support from Dream Arcades.

[via Kotaku]