I promised you in my first post that I wouldn’t be posting frequently and so far I’m keeping up that end of the bargain!

Nevertheless, some progress has been made on the build…

I have three differing tacks being tackled at present, so a quick update on each; Woodwork, System and Artwork

Woodwork:

It’s still pretty miserable weather wise here in the UK which means no cutting progress has been made as I need to work outside. What has happened however is marking up. I am ready to cut as soon as I get a nice weekend day. Last weekend I spent a full day (with help from my daughter) preparing the wood for the initial cuts. The pieces are pretty heavy so I’m looking forward to getting them cut up and ready to go!!

System:

My system, which is built on Hyperspin, is coming along pretty nicely. The weather at least can’t affect this part. The biggest challenge of using Hyperspin is sourcing all the artwork to go with the various systems. I believe this can be paid for, but I am somewhat reluctant to do this if it can be helped, so a significant level of manual legwork has gone into this! Once setup I also intend to try and make the themes for the system a little bit cleaner – Hyperspin is extremely customisable with a bit of work, but the stock themes are very ‘in your face’ with lots of bells and whistles – I want some of this, but equally I hope to get to a slightly cleaner theme in the end… this will all come after the…

Artwork:

Before I’ll be able to finish the Woodwork, I will need to nail down the artwork… why? Because without at minimum the control panel artwork, I don’t want to be drilling any holes only for the placement of the control panel vinyl to be slightly off…

Deciding what artwork to go for has been a challenge. I wanted something unique to me, and not just a standard multiple arcade character ‘mashup’. With this in mind I started to think about what my favorite, or at least most played, arcade games were as a kid… These were Bubble Bobble and Street Fighter II. The cabinets themselves were not that special – mostly wood vaneer with a stuck on label, but the games bring back memories!!

I was initially thinking of going with just one of these games, but somebody on the Hyperspin forums suggested mashing these two games up… an idea was born!

It’s not there yet, but I am currently leaning towards “Super Bubble Fighter”, “Taito vs Capcom” or something similar – below you will see a previous iteration visualised:

I’m still working on this as I say, but the formation of the idea is there – I just need to find the end point!!
I’d also like to try and work Blanka and Dhalsim in there, but they don’t have Puzzle Fighter characters (which is where the cute Street Fighter artwork has come from)

Anyway – you can see where I’m going 🙂

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts in the comments below… you can also see further discussion on the Hyperspin Forums here