I went through a few different ideas on the design for the cabinet. Originally I was going to design it around an early eighties arcade theme. Something along the lines of what Atari did for the design on the 2600 cartridge boxes. I never really hit on what I wanted, but I came up with a few directions some of which I have included below but I never completed them because I settled on a new idea.
After watching Tron Legacy I settled on the idea of using the fictional Space Paranoids game from the first Tron movie as the basis of my cabinet. It turns out that as part of the promotion for the new movie they had built a functioning Space Paranoids game. It would be this remake that I would model my cabinet after. I found some pictures of that as well as some screen grabs from the original movie and some other great source material as well. Here are some examples I used as inspiration.
This fellow here created some absolutely fantastic work and posted it on the Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forums BYOAC Link SpaceParanoids.net
I took all of these various sources and compiled my own to fit the Mortal Kombat II cabinet. Things like adjusting the position of elements as well as rebuilding the logo from the poster which I liked more and modifying the control panel layout to a two player that fits my MKII cabinet. I also have the designs for the MAMEWAH front-end loosely meant to match the Tron/Encom look. I have some more tweaking to do, but when I have my final designs complete, I will see about making my source files available for download out of respect for the community as well as the original artists.
I created the Encom and Space Paranoids logos from scratch in Adobe Illustrator.
Here is a larger version of the work in progress side art.
Last up we have my MAMEWAH screens that I have started working on. I created a slightly different ones for each emulator I plan on running. The main difference besides the obvious color variations is that I took a photo of each system and created kind of an outline illustration of each in Adobe Illustrator. I have a bit more work to do refining these, but I think these are heading in the right direction.
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