 And that's how I roll. If you need to screen tilt it back a little bit more, you just bend it back. And yes, I did cut myself doing that. So I like doing fun cheap projects, or even projects that don't cost me anything. And hopefully this won't, because I'm going to have all the parts. What I want to do is I already have a large arcade cabinet I built like 15 years ago. I want to make a little tabletop one. I've had this scrap piece of plywood in my garage for a couple of years now. And back probably about 12 years ago, I bought two of these EPCs. These were one of the original netbooks as they were called. Tiny little laptops, one gig of RAM. I think the hard drives went bad in it. But I had two of them. I overpaid for them. They were like 500 bucks back in the day. They quickly dropped to like 200. I was one of the first bill to buy them. But they'd just been sitting in my office doing nothing for years. So I decided to make myself a tabletop arcade system with one of them. Because plenty of, I already tested games. I need to retest this one to make sure that it still runs after I did this to it. I started looking at videos on how to properly take it apart. It was just too hard. I'm just like, the wires are still connected. Basically, because it's going to be an arcade thing, the screen's going to be tilted this way a little bit. And I just needed to keep the keyboard out of the way of the controls. Speaking of the controls, again, this project's not going to cost me anything, hopefully. Because I already have the computer. I already have this board. I do have a number of Raspberry Pi's I'm not using anymore. But then I would need to, I guess I have some screens. But they're not small screens like this because I want this thing to be small. But I do have, remember five years ago or so, maybe three years ago, I made an arcade controller for my daughter. Well, I have an extra joystick and a whole bunch of extra buttons and a controller board. I already love it. We're from that, both red and blue buttons. So hopefully this won't cost me anything. I've looked up plans online and I'm just going to eyeball what I need to cut holding up that laptop. I just need to make it wide enough so the USB ports can still be accessed for the controller and the power supply on the other side. Other than that, most of the gaming cabinets I've looked for plans online all have very small bases. But I still need the computer here underneath the screen. So mine's going to stand up a little bit and actually look more like a real arcade machine, just smaller. So that's my goal today. I've been thinking about this for a while. Finally just getting up and doing it. And by the way, I'm doing this my way, which is the thoughts in my head and I don't actually have plans drawn out. So far all I've done is held the laptop up to this piece of wood with the screen bent back and I drew a very rough pencil outline. I haven't measured anything. I don't know how wide it's going to be. I'm just going to start cutting and hope for the best. I figured the sides are the two most important parts to get right. Everything else, I can use the rest of this wood or if that doesn't work, I have a pile of pallets outside that I can run through a planer and make nice and use those for where the joystick goes or the top of it or the base of it. So I'm not too worried as long as I get the sides right, everything else I should be able to use scrap wood for. I also plan on trying to do some ink transfers, which I've done a number of times for wood signs and stuff, very simple to do once you get the hang of it. And so maybe I'll put like Ryu from Street Fighter on one side and Mario on the other side or something. So yeah, this video is less material. I'm just going to start working and show you where I'm at at different stages. Okay, I've done most of the cuts for the side with the table saw. I have to go in with another saw. Table saw, I can't get this angled one without cutting this and this. But that's going to be the basic look of it. I might angle this a little bit, something like that. But yeah, this is where the screen is going to go. This is where the control is going to go. The computer is going to be down in here with the screen up there. And then we have a little front board here with the title of a game or something. So I just need to cut out this piece and then mirror image it. So there we go. You can see it a little bit better now. Also, this is an example of a test I did back when I was learning how to ink transfers. So this is done with an inkjet printer and some paper, the backs of stickers. I'll show you how to do this in a little bit, but you can see how well it comes out. So I'm hoping to do that sort of thing on the side of this cabinet here. So I've got both sides cut out now. You can see how the laptop will fit between them like so. And I still need to make sure this laptop works after what I've done to it. But the wire is still seam intact and that's the most important thing. Also, this is, earlier I said I might need to use some pallet wood. Although I think I have enough of the plywood. This is a piece of pallet wood. You can see it's real rough on that side by putting a planer on this side and it looks pretty nice. Now, last time I made something like this on my channel was the arcade controller. And some of the comments were complaining that I used cheap wood. Duh! That's the point of the project. I even said that in the project. I'm using scrap wood. That's how I build things. And also someone said my workmanship was not very good or something along those lines. It's like, yeah, this is not what I do. I do this for fun. I'm not making a professional product. A couple of brad nails, a few pieces of wood to structurally start putting it together. I'm happy so far. Uh-oh. Nothing coming up on the screen. The device is on. At least I have two of these. That's why I wasn't too worried about breaking this one. And I do have a third backup plan if I can't get these to work. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Okay, first off, I don't even test this thing out before I bent the screen back. I don't even know if it worked. These things did have issues. They would overheat. The hard drive went bad, and at least one of them. So it probably was me bending back, but I've taken it apart, and the wires all seem good. The machine is definitely turning on, but getting nothing on the screen. Again, I try putting the battery back in, because I wasn't sure. Maybe it doesn't run without the battery, but that didn't help. didn't help. Then I tried screwing the brackets for the screen back on thing and maybe that was a ground that the monitor needed. Anyway, so I still have another one, which I should test it and make sure it works, which fits in there. It's like I'm kind of forcing it a little bit to get the angle and the keyboard's going forward, but it will work. I'm pretty sure. So my other idea, if it does not work, so these are nine inch screens. I could wait until Black Friday. Last year I got some really cheap tablets for my kids. Maybe that was two years ago for 30 bucks. Seven inch screens, I think no eight inch screens. But for now, this is my wife's tablet. She hasn't used it in forever. It is an old Samsung. I think it's still running Android 4.0, but I should be able to get some games running out. It's a little smaller than originally intended, but if I make the frame right, I can always try to upgrade the screen later. So I might go for this now and enlarge the screen, get a different device later. But let's plug in this other EPC and see if it even works. I don't know if you can tell it's pretty bright out here. This one did turn on. There's no hard drive installed on it. I plan on running everything off a SD card, but it does turn on. So I'm going to go ahead with this one and see if I can fit in there with the game controller. If not, I can always switch to a tablet. I can use my wife's for the time being and the future. Definitely come across cheap tablets again. So at this point, I think the next thing I need to do is cut some pieces of wood to frame in the monitor, and also to keep the monitor up where it is. If it was a tablet, I'd make some sort of mount up here. But if I put a piece of wood down at the base here, the keyboard could stand on it. And I think that will hold it up right where it needs to be. So piece of wood here, piece of wood here, piece of wood there, and then maybe start working on the joystick or the top. I was doing so good that I messed up two nails right in a row. Ten and a quarter. Ten and a quarter. It is Florida. It is the summer. It is hot. I am tired. I'm going to finish this later this week. Not that you really need to know because I'm probably edit it all together, but my shirt might change. I just wanted to let you know why. Okay, it is two-day. Well, my lens is foggy. Welcome to this humid morning here in Florida. It is a few days later. It is early enough that it's not super hot yet. Going to get a little bit done today. I had some ideas as soon as I stopped recording the other day. First off, the computer that we had in here. I started thinking, you know, my wife's tablet's a little small. The computer's hard to fit in there. What about my tablet? This thing is, I think, 2014 Samsung. And I use it primarily just to read comics before bed. That's really all I use it for. I still want to use it for that, but I figure if I have the top being able to open, I could slide this in and out, and it fits perfectly right there. It's a little bit thinner than the computer, but a piece of plywood holds it in place. All I have to do is put a little bracket here, a little bracket here, a little piece of wood, something to hold it. It also works out great because it goes straight to the edges here where originally the computer I left spaces for the USB cord. Well, the USB comes out the bottom here. So once they just get a little adapter, OTG adapter, I can run that directly to the controller. And then hopefully I'll just be able to slide it in and out, and when I want to use it, I'll slide it in there, and the rest of the time will be by my bed for me to read with. So there's that. That's great. It's running an older version of Android 5, but I installed RetroArch, and everything seems to be working. I got Mario Brothers running on it. Next thought I had, trying to put no money into this, but I'm going to spend a dollar, okay? Maybe three dollars, so I might buy paint. That's another thing. I talked about doing the ink transfers, which I will have to do a video on that in the future, but I think making this black will look better than just the wood grain. So the ink transfer won't even be able to see it if I paint it black. So I think I'm going to do black and then get some photos printed, cut them out, and glue them on there or something like that for the images on the side. I think it will look a lot better. Maybe I have some black light paint that I painted some things in my kids bedroom with, and I might do the trim in some sort of colored black light paint. We'll see. But also, I'm showing you this picture of me and my wife when we were younger, a frame from the dollar store. So this frame is a dollar. It is the perfect width. A lot of people will put glass over the monitor, tape off the sides, and spray paint it black so it fits the screen perfectly rather than trying to get the wood to fit it perfectly. So I might do that. It's a little long, but I figure I've never done it before. If I've seen videos where you can just score glass and then break it. So I'm hoping to do that. And it's something I might do with the extra piece. If the extra piece of that fits up here nicely, and I don't know if I'm going to do this, but I might put a label here with some sort of picture. I didn't plan on having a backlight here, which a lot of arcades do. But if I print a picture up here and put the glass over it and then run a strip of LEDs over the top, it might glow nicely. I don't know. I might do that. So those are the things that I was working on or I thought of after last time. Today I'm going to look at cutting out where the joysticks going to go, doing the back panel here, which a lot of people have doors that hinge, but I don't think I'll really need that because the bottom is somewhat open and the top is going to hinge open for the screen. So I might just do a solid piece of plywood on the back. But just going to get a little bit done today before it gets too hot. So let's get started. This is what I meant when I said earlier that I'm building this my way. I am far from being a perfectionist. If I was trying to be a perfection of this, I would get bored with it halfway through and never finish it. So I'm not even going to measure. I haven't measured anything. And I'm just going to chop off a little bit and see how it works. So before I go any further, I need to make sure this game controller works on this tablet and everything. And I just programmed it out. And as you can see, I'm moving. I'm jumping. Everything seems to be working. Perfect. Okay, sanded, painted, holes all lined up. Again, just eyeballed, which I was actually very lucky. I just measured out. I did this with my last joystick too. I got to remember that these brackets for the joystick take up more space. It just barely clears my little select button there. Also, I just went inside, hooked this up to my computer and marked which side is the upside. Now, most games you can reprogram the controller, but you don't want to have to reprogram the controller every time you start a new game or install a new game. So there is a standard. This is up, down, right and left. So I'm going to go ahead and put all this in. Okay, buttons all in, joystick in. Joystick did actually overlap the button here a little bit, but it didn't seem to make a difference once I tightened that down. Got wires on one of these, got to just hook up the wires to the others and connect to the board in the proper order again. Okay, all wired up. Originally, I was thinking about putting hinges on the joystick controller so I could flip it up if I need to get to the wires. But I thought I've seen people play on my full size arcade before. And although these are just buttons, they're not pressure sensitive. So hitting it harder doesn't make any difference in the game. People get excited and they start whacking these things. And if I put hinges on this, the little hinges I have, I think they're just going to tear off. So I'm going to nail down the controller with brad nails. And then I still have the bottom open here. I think if I need to access wires here or here, hopefully I never really need to do that. Also, let's look at USB connector options. So these are wires that I've already had. So this is just an OTA cable on the go OTA. Yeah, on on the OTG OTG cable. So this will allow me to hook the controller into my tablet with micro USB here. Another option I have, which is what I'm probably going to go with is, yeah, the tablet has battery power. So I don't need any power cables going to this. But let's say the battery is almost dead or I'm gonna run for a while. I have this little OTG cable, which I can plug the controller into and then this into the tablet, and I can plug this into a wall outlet and power everything. So there's that option. And then if I really want to, I have this fancy little thing, which is the same thing, but it has three connectors for devices and one for power. So I hope this end to the tablet, this end to a power outlet, you know, phone charger of some sort. And then I can hook one controller here. And then if I wanted to hook up other controllers, where people can stand next to the arcade and we play multiplayer, I could hook this into there and hook up two other controllers. But for now, I'm just going to go with this one because it's not going to be hardwired into the cabinet so I can take it out whenever I want. But controller goes in there, plugs in the tablet here. And then if I want, I can plug into the wall outlet here and run it for hours. Okay, the controllers nailed on. The top is hinged. Almost forgot something. Okay, so for graphics on the cabinet had a few options. Again, if I didn't paint it black, I could have done an ink transfer and some done something like that if I left it with the wood look or something lighter. Another thing I was looking at, you know, just getting eight by 10s printed and cutting them out in certain ways, eight by 10s are a little over a dollar apiece. Then I looked at options like posters, I can get a 16 by 20, no 16 by 12 print for just under $5. But I would need to get two of those. That would have been $10. And again, I'm trying to spend as little as possible. I could have gotten a bigger print and done it all on one for about $8. It would have been a 16 by 20 because this is 16 inches tall and about 11 inches deep. And I could have done some other graphics in between the cutouts. I decided to go with the absolute cheapest options. Four by sixes I can get online for about nine cents. So I ordered them for 63 cents. I got all my graphics right here, which hopefully will look halfway decent on here. So mail to my house, they have to be losing money on shipping. I don't know how they do this, but I've got Ryu here. So I might trim around him, put him on the side. And then for the front bottom underneath the cabinet, underneath the controller, I have Ryu and Ken, but I needed a wider. So I just got, you know, I cropped it and then I'm just going to overlay them and so that they line up properly and it will fit perfectly down here. Same thing for the top of the arcade. I'm going to have to trim this a little bit for height, but I got this graphic offline says arcade. So I can just go like so and put it right there. And it will say arcade with a bunch of characters on there. I also got a little extra here that I might put on the side, which is from the X-Men game. So again, just going to line it up and glue it down on the side of the cabinet. So let's hope this turns out okay. So they're not perfect, but for 63 cents, I think I turned out pretty good. That's right here. I had to crop the top and bottom a little more than I had planned. So some of the characters are cut in half. Ryu, I cut out. You can go right down here somewhere. And then this one, I misjudged the width of it, but it fits on there pretty good just like that. So and then I still have the X-Men one, which I might put on the other side here. So there you go. Playing with the joystick like that is not the easiest. Again, this is mostly a novelty. Again, obviously it costs money to build something like this, but my goal was to build it with stuff I already had since I already had buttons in the joystick laying around and some wood. So all together, this costs me less than five dollars. 63 cents for the art, for the images I had printed. And then I also bought a can of spray paint, which was three dollars and change, which I didn't need. I did have paint, but I wanted to do spray paint just to make sure it went on evenly. And then I also bought that dollar frame for glass that ended up not working out. So all together about five dollars for me. Obviously, if you were to build this, again, wood is expensive, but if you can find scrap wood lying around. So the main costs of this, if you wanted to build one, are the buttons, which you can buy a double set. So all together, let's see, eight, ten, twenty buttons that light up. The controller board and two joysticks is usually about $40 on Amazon. And I used less than half of that. So you can look at this as a $20 cost for that. And then whatever old computer hardware you have lying around, you have to build a frame around that. So it's a cheap build either way. You could definitely do it for under $50 if you put forth the effort. But I did it for five dollars using what I had laying around. And tools, really all you need is a saw. If you don't have a saw, I mean a cheap jigsaw would not cost very much. You probably get one at Walmart's 30 bucks maybe, 40 bucks, and it's something useful to have around. And then some sandpaper. So again, it is an old tablet, 2014 Samsung tablet, a cheaper one at the time. And yeah, not all the games are going to run on that. I tried a couple of main games. Some didn't load, some loaded, some ran really slow. Nintendo runs fine on it. Gameboy Advance would run a little slow though. On a desktop computer, you definitely have the options in most emulators to drop the frame rate, which can get the game running a little bit smoother. I did not see an option glancing over the menus in retro arch on my tablet. But I'm going to look into that more. And again, the tablet can always be upgrade later. Originally I was going to use that old EPC, which is actually probably slower than a tablet. And it's a smaller screen now. I think those are nine inch, because they're EPC 900. So there were nine inch screens where this is a 10 inch screen. But that thing only had 512 ram in it, where this tablet I believe has two. Which, looking online just the other day, just to see on Amazon, you can get a cheap 10 inch tablet with two gigs of ram for between $60 and $100 on any given day. Are those any better than my old tablet? The ram's about the same. I'm not sure about processing power. But definitely could be upgraded later on. So I hope you enjoyed this project. I had fun making it. It's definitely going to be fun when I have guests over and my kids are looking forward to playing with it. And that's it. Thanks for watching. Visit FilmsByChris.com. That's Chris at the K. There's a link in the description. And as always, I hope that you have a great day. Also visit my Patreon link in the description. Bye. Well, that was a fail. Complete fail on that.