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So I've been sitting on this project idea for a long time, (about 8 years in fact) but now I figured it's time to make this a reality...

Almost a decade ago I took ownership of a display bezel from a Nintendo Sheriff. I acquired it from a local operator what was winding down and clearing out some of his old stash he kept from game conversions. All in all we'd pulled 3 bezels, 2 PSUs, and 2 coin doors from at least 3 Nintendo Sheriff cabs that he had told me he converted back in the mid 80's, and the cabs had since been lost to time and sold off. That gives me hope that one day I'll come across one locally, probably painted black and with a modified coin door (as is tradition), but who knows. In the mean time I don't want this bezel just sitting here in a pile of spare art so I've decided to give it a new (temporary) lease on life as wall decoration in my collection. I'll try to add links as I go if you want to build on of these yourself for an old bezel you have laying around.

Oh, and for the full gallery of the build you can click this link here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAMgxj

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The plan here is to mount it in a temporary frame with some LED backlighting and a display showing a loop of the gameplay/attract mode. Ideally I wanted to have the ability to play sound from the clip as well, but seeing that I film quite a bit in my basement it wasn't something I really wanted to add. If you were doing this yourself it would be nothing to find a display with built in speakers or an audio out, or to strip the audio from the HDMI and run it to a speaker or a surface transducer. But I'm not gonna go this route here.

Plan of attack here is to first source a decent quality, thin, and appropriately sized display to fit behind the bezel. Then build a box, wire it up with some LED lighting, and hand it on the wall.

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It was mainly the display selection that held this project up so long. Well, that and lazyness... Anyway, I managed to get motivated and tried a few different displays from Amazon. eventually settling on this 24" LCD from Samsung. it strikes the perfect balance between cost (it was only $100 Canadian on sale), and physical size. It fits the area behind the bezel perfectly, and has a 100mm VESA mounting pattern on the back, and HDMI in. It also powers back on by itself when I cut and reintroduce power to it I I dont have to manually turn it on when I activate my arcade lighting. So, win. We'll also be using some 5v COB LED strips for the marquee, a couple sizes of foam weatherstripping, a 5v BoostBuck DC to DC converter, and some old knotted pine I had laying around.

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To power the video im going to be using one of the trick of my Film trade. We call these little media boxes "Playback" boxes. We use them on film sets to run a simple still or video source to a TV or computer display to fake screen content, or put up VFX screens for post. Actually if you watch the arcade in The Last of Us, or 90% of the computer/TV screens in Fargo Season 5 you'll see one of these in action. For this project I'm simply going to rip a 9 minute long play video from YouTube at 1080p, add some scantiness and chromatic aberration to the video to give it a CRT look, and play it off this box via the USB port. The boxes can loop the video indefinitely and they start up on power as well.

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The next step here will be to build the frame. It needs to be simple, and easy to take apart if I ever find a cab. I also need to make it as light as possible. Cheap pine like this gives me that knotted look of the original cabinet (even under paint), but it's also not crazy expensive. the downside is its a much softer wood and a bit of a pain to deal with when cutting and routing. I did some basic measurements and decided on a simple design.

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Once I have it all glued and screwed up, I also needed to add some extra strips to hold the back panel on. The design is simple, a top area for the marquee light, a bottom area for the display, and the back panel which holds the display and electronics.

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I'll need to measure out some accurate holes on the back to mount the display and make sure the French cleat I'm using to hang the whole thing supports both the back and the frame. To transfer the whole across to the hardboard im just using a simple drafting square.

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