Bartop Fruit Machine Build

[smithers18]

Hi. 

Just a quick post to share my bartop build - see below:

 

The cabinet is built from 18mm MDF for the sides and 12mm for the control panel and I used some red sticky-back furniture trim for the edges (which has held up much better than I thought it would). I painted the wood with black paint then sanded it down and applied some carbon fiber style vinyl to it.

This is using an all-in-one HP Touchsmart 520 PC with a 23" touch screen display and this particular PC is not very 'cabinet friendly' because as you can probably see from the back picture the VESA mounts are off center but they are also tilted (so that the monitor would be pointing downward in normal application). I had to account for this by removing chunks of metal from the mounting plate and adding standoffs under the screws. This was not ideal and in the process I managed to sheer off one of the mounting holes (hence why there are only 3 bolts holding the monitor in instead of 4!). 

The PC itself is really quite low spec (I5 2400S). I had to add a desktop cooler to it as the laptop style cooler that came as standard wouldn't work properly when the back cover was taken off and I also had to disable CPU throttling and reduce from 1080p to 720p resolution to get the best performance out of it. It works fine now but in hindsight I should have opted for one with a better spec or better again would be to buy a proper touch-screen display rather than an all-in-one pc, but of course they can be much more expensive. 

I have a PacLED64 in there to power and control the 5v button LED's and its more than adequate with plenty of spare slots. I really wanted to add a coin mech / hopper into it but also wanted to keep this small and unfortunately that means I can't fit those in which is a shame but I can live with it! The buttons themselves are hooked up to a cheap USB joystick controller (Zero Delay board). 

Software wise - this is running Coinops for a frontend and using a vertical theme. With the help of 'JoyToKey' I can control the frontend menu and all the games using the face buttons with 'High' and 'Low' to navigate up and down the menu and 'Start' to open a game. The 'X-Change' button will exit a game if it is held down for more than 1 second.  I use LEDBlinky to make the lights flash within the frontend and then of course MFME takes over in-game and I still have a ton of configuration to do for each game for the Pacdrive and display cropping (I've done about 10 so far and it took me a while!). 

All that's left to do is make a back panel with a power switch and maybe add some graphics to the sides. Overall I'm quite happy, definitely some lessons learned along the way but I'm pleased with how its turned out and playing them like this is much more fun!

Thanks to other members for your inspiring posts, I've been wanting to do this for ages and actually had all the parts for about 5 years sitting in the loft!  Here is a short video showing it in action: 

 

 

All the best, 

Steve

[smithers18]

Whilst I'm posting I have a question about scaling in Windows and I wonder if anyone here might know the answer? So as you can see my cab is vertically orientated (as I guess most fruit cabs will be). I would really like to add some slot style games but the ones I have tried do not work with the 720x1280 resolution so they just show part of the screen with the rest being cut off. I have fiddled around with the scaling options in the 'Compatibility' tab in Windows but none of the options really do anything to help and the image just remains the same static size. 

Is there any application that can force a program to run at a specified resolution? Ideally it would run in a (borderless) window and would allow scaling to the full size of the screen, even if that meant altering the aspect ratio and stretching the image. I have tried searching but can't seem to find anything out there?

[Altheman2004]

This looks amazing, thanks for sharing your build.

[Boulderdash]

Looks great. I want one!

Although you could do with a 4th hold button for clubbers...

[smithers18]

15 hours ago, Boulderdash said:

Looks great. I want one!

Although you could do with a 4th hold button for clubbers...

Thanks! I don't play the club versions myself so I decided not to add a 4th hold as I was already limited on space.

I am now toying with the idea of fitting a coin slot and a hopper. I have just bought a Money Controls Universal Hopper (parallel interface) and if I can fit it in to the cab then I'm going to go for it. I am just going to make my own simple coin mechanism using a optocoupler module that will sense any coin going into it and fire off a signal and my plan would be to just use tokens (I'm not bothered about using real money, its more just for the authentic feel of it). The machines I like to play all spit out pound coins in the real world so I don't think I have the worry of accounting for smaller denominations.

I will update here if it fits but I fear if it doesn't then I may be starting another project altogether! 

[Biomedscout]

Wow this looks great! Thanks for sharing, it gives me some ideas. 

[Road Hog Mad]

I like the finish, is it carbon fibre? Mine would look neat with that as its just hand painted. 

Where did you get it from?

[smithers18]

Hi. Yes its just a carbon fibre vinyl wrap, I always use it for finishing because I'm not so good at painting! I'll generally prime the wood then paint it then give it a good sanding until its smooth and then apply the wrap however I have applied it directly to bare, sanded mdf before and that worked too, I just feel the paint makes it stick a bit better? 

Here is the one I bought: https://ebay.us/m/l18NfK (I ordered the '3D Carbon Matt' in 6mx50cm size).

May I ask where did you get the manufacturer logos from that are on your machine? I think something like that would look quite nice on the screen bezels on mine. Did you just print them yourself?

[Road Hog Mad]

From the resources on here then printed them out @smithers18

[woodsy]

On 16/09/2025 at 19:51, Boulderdash said:

Looks great. I want one!

Although you could do with a 4th hold button for clubbers...

we should work together on building one mate

[smithers18]

Well my hopper arrived today and as expected its too big to squeeze into my bartop build. Doh! 

 

 

 

I guess I have a few options: 

1) Make an extra addon piece to the back of the cab to accommodate the hopper BUT directing the coin output to the front of the cab would be a big problem which I really don't know how to achieve? 
2) Find out if there are any smaller hoppers out there (Cube Hopper maybe?) and see if they would be a better fit, but I would still have the coin routing issue.
3) Add the hopper into the stand I made instead of trying to fit it into the bartop machine - This is the easiest option but it would lose its 'portability' and would no longer really be a bartop machine!
4) Start over and build a new, bigger machine whilst still trying to retain a 'portable' vibe - this would be my least favourite option however if I were to do this then I'd try and source an external touchscreen monitor (anyone got one for sale?) instead of using an all-in-one PC. That way I could have a better spec PC and also it would be alot easier to fit that the hacking I needed to do for the all-in-one!

So I am currently at a loss of what to do, I suspect I may go for option 3 (add the hopper into the stand) unless anyone knows of a trick to route the coin output from the back of the machine into the front? To be honest, I'm a little unsure how you normally route the coins out anyway, do people normally just have the hopper directly behind / above the coin catching part, where you would stick your hand in and pick out the coins? 

Appreciate any thoughts, especially if I'm missing something obvious! On a side note, thanks to @davep180for his old wiring diagram for these Money Controls Universal MK4 hoppers - I got it working first time, cheers. 

[davep180]

Those hoppers are big and rapid payers. 
The azkoyen parallel hoppers are slower but take up less room. The way round you have it though, I doubt there is any difference.