The Virtual Boy Arcade Cab

Hey everybody, I had wanted to post this for a while, but due to FunSpot and the Tron Launch Party videos being new I wanted to post them first. I still have some videos I need to finish, but I wanted to give credit where credit is due. This video made the rounds on the interwebs, over 68,000 people have watched this video so without any further or due, here's the Virtual Boy Arcade Cab!



Now being an arcade fan, I have seen A LOT of bad conversions. My Neo-Geo MVS motherboard came from a butchered Double Dragon cab. There's also a few sites that chronicle the countless horrible MAME machines. From the monstrosity's that people create with a dozen or more buttons, flight sticks, trackballs, butchering perfectly good machines for a computer MAME box. I won't even post the video of the guy that gutted a Neo-Geo Candy Cab with a computer and a printed out Killer Instinct marquee. Then you have the very few people that do some nice work, then drop a POS X-Arcade stick onto the front of it.

So naturally when I heard somebody made a homemade Virtual Boy Arcade Cab I was very skeptical, but after seeing it in action I have to eat all my words. The cab's creator Tighe Lory had posted his pictures and videos of the cab over on Neo-Geo.com where I visit the forums often. His idea for the cab was really neat. He took the idea of Battlezone and also mixed it with a game you may have seen on here, Baby Pac-Man to create this new cab that looks like something Nintendo would have made in the 80's.

The head mount works a lot like the original Virtual Boy displays (Digital Press has one) where the mount can go up and down and lock so tall people or kids can play it. The controls are where Baby Pac-Man comes into play. Since one of Tighe's favorite games is Galactic Pinball he put two flipper buttons on the side of the machine to play like a pinball machine. The main controls work almost like flight sticks with the top buttons being for the L and R buttons and four buttons on the front for the B and A buttons and also Select and Start.

For me though what makes the cab perfect is what Tighe put behind the cab. On the back he custom made two plates. One that is a recreation of the plates Nintendo would put on their cabs with the serial and model numbers, but the second is what takes it over the top. On the left he made a plate for the late Gunpey Yokoi, the creator of the Virtual Boy, the D-Pad and the Game Boy who's life was ended after a car accident in 1997 after he left Nintendo. I think he'd get a real kick out of that if he ever saw it.

So a tip of my hat to Tighe for an awesome job on an amazing cabinet. Now I want to play some Teleroboxer!