All of the coolest arcade cabinets were custom jobs. Instead of a standard cabinet, generic controls, and bland graphics slapped on the side, they would come in unique shapes or would include controls tailored to the game. TRON is a good example, because it had some neat features like UV-reactive graphics and a custom flight stick in place of the usual joystick. Replicating that 1:1 would be tricky enough, and doing it at half-scale comes with a whole new set of challenges. But Tommy Shilo of the Tossing Mashed YouTube channel wasn’t deterred and managed to build a very accurate half-scale TRON arcade cabinet.
You really need to watch the whole video to get a good sense of the amount of work that went into this project, but we’re going to cover some of the highlights.
The project started with the construction of the cabinet itself. Shilo had original cabinet dimensions to work with and was able to scale those by 0.5 and then have MDF panels cut on a CNC router. He glued that together and spray-painted everything black, then stuck on printed graphics colored-in with UV markers. Those react to the UV lamp built into the cabinet to achieve the distinctive glowing effect that matches the TRON aesthetic so well.
After that, things ramped up in difficulty quickly. The custom monitor shroud, for example, was quite the undertaking. Shilo purchased an original full-size shroud and used that to gather dimensions in order to create a 3D model. He then scaled that down and 3D-printed it.
The flight stick was similarly challenging and Shilo reproduced that by having a friend 3D-scan an original. Shilo then resin-printed that at half-scale and used that print to create a mold so he could resin-cast the miniature flight stick in an appropriate translucent blue color. That was then attached to a modified Sanwa joystick.
Shilo even added a half-size coin-op mechanism, complete with half-size quarter sticking out of one of the slots.
The video doesn’t have a lot of information on the electronics, but Shilo does say that he used a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to run the game through emulation. His original plan was to connect that to an LCD monitor half the size of the original CRT, but he got trashed for that idea on Reddit and ended up switching to a CRT with a diagonal measurement of 9.4”.
The reveal is a real treat, because it is a near-perfect half-scale recreation of the iconic TRON arcade cabinet. Shilo was even able to get some related signatures to put onto the cabinet — but you’re going to have to watch the video to see who those signatures belong to.
