Arcade PCB Shells
01/01/18
As much as my ghetto arcade setup (consisting of a supergun, two PSU, one dodgy DIY molex cable, a PVM, and PS2 Namco arcade stick) is working pretty nicely, it is always a pain to leave the arcade PCB out for weeks, because not only this is getting all sort of dust and crap, but for sure one day there's going to be an accident and the PCB is gonna get damaged. And what's the point of setting up such a mess if it's just to play a few hours, and also, how am I going to become a shmup god if I can't train whenever I can?
I thought that one thing that would be cool is to sandwich the PCB between two clear acrylic glass panels, and make it tidy with spacers and holes for heat sinks and components getting too hot. I could even go full autisticofetishist on this and have the game logo engraved or something. I looked around and the closest I could find was a guy doing something similar with some thick bendy plastic sheets, although in his case, it's more to facilitate the storing and retrieval of PCB and not so much to protect them when in use.
However someone showed me that there were commercial options for some arcade systems:
This.
Exactly what I thought doing, so let's do it :)