Santoro Family Webpage

Thanks for visiting. This is the homepage of the Santoro family in Basking Ridge New Jersey, USA.

Instead of boring the family with updates on my arcade machine construction I set up dedicated site to document the progress end-to-end.

The URL is http://sites.santoro.com/arcadereplay/

OK, I was finally able to fix the photo gallery. 

I have also added a lot of new digitized scans from our 1988-1999 family photos. Next chore: renaming and categorizing our photos for 2007 and 2008 to date.  We have a bunch going back to last summer.

Previously the Photo Gallery was ‘hosted’ on a PC in my basement, but that had caused some reliability issues. In February I began working on moving it to the Santoro.com server but ran into some difficulties. It may be a few months before I can spend a day or so working on it.

The Gallery will be back though, and when it is it will be faster and more secure.

I made some significant improvements to the overall shape of the cabinet. This is close to the final design.

It’s been four years since I built my “Mamenation” arcade machine, and we have enjoyed it thoroughly .

The technology has come along way in those four years and Mamenation is HUGE, protruding rudely into our den. With the recent LCD price reductions it is now possible to build a slimmer arcade cabinet than was previously possible with large, deep CRT tube-style monitors. All these facts, combined with the fact that I haven’t built anything cool in a few years, made me decide to build a new, slim arcade machine. I will be selling Mamenation to fund the new project.

Last time around I did paper sketches and it wasn’t conducive to quality work. This time around I used the opportunity to learn “Sketchup,” a free 3D modeling program from Google. It has a rather steep learning curve. I have spent about 15 hours with it so far and am now just starting to not be spastic with it. In the end it was worth it because it gives you the ability to look at your creation from any angle before it ever exists.

Here is the design I am leaning toward:

(click for larger picture..)

I have ordered all the parts that I need and should start construction soon if work doesn’t keep me working late too much.