The Game Cart Thing: Part 1

Junked wood microwave cart

It's pretty tough for me to pass a rubbish pile in front of someone's house and not slow down to have a look. On a warm day in June, I happened upon the unsold remains of an estate sale, where this microwave caddy was waiting for me to show up. The wheels still spun, and there was relatively little damage, so you know I had to load it in the truck and haul it down to the workshop.

GCT with White Paint

As classy as cheap veneer is, I knew this cart could be so much more than just another way for me to stub a toe in my kitchen. I had been trying to come up with a way to house my TI-99/4a, PS4 and a Windows 7 PC in the living room so I could play my old game collection without hogging our main television. The natural beauty of this fine piece of modular furniture was a bit too much for my humble living room, so it looked like a fresh coat of white primer and enamel was in order...mostly because that's what I had lying around, and it needed to be used up.

GCT with Edge Band

With the top of the cart now flipped, it was exposing some of the pitted edges of the pressboard which are pretty much impossible to paint. I decided to get some simple 0.625" black edge banding and glue it on with some DAP RapidFuse, which worked better than expected. I also had some flat black paint that seemed useful for the back panels, and the inside of the lower compartment, given that all the cords, power supplies and PC would be tucked out of sight down there. And to hide the inevitable dust that will accumulate. Overall, I ended up liking the look enough to not repaint it.

Custom Mount

It was pretty much impossible to find a VESA connector for the television that would allow me to position it nicely inside the upper compartment, so I decided to make one after harvesting the mount from an old stand I was not using. After some cutting, grinding and picking up an appropriately sized pipe flange, I had a sturdy mount that I could just bolt right where I wanted it.

Cart with blinky guts

Soon, it was time to stuff it full of wires and make sure this was going to be a comfortable fit for what I had in mind. I used an APC Back-up UPS 550 as a power distributor, though not for any specific reason other than it needed purpose. The tower PC is a Dell Inspiron 3656 that I recycled from work. Not an old PC by any stretch, but I tossed a Geforce GT720 in it and did a fresh install of Windows 7 SP1, which might be a problem for some of the really old games in my collection, but I'll figure that out later. There's nothing particularly fancy about the Insignia TV being used as a display, other than its wide variety of input types. I'm not sure if you can still get these at Best Buy, but there were cheap 19" televisions that seemed to handle the signal from old game systems quite well. When you're trying to mix old and new hardware on the same display, this becomes pretty important.

Game Cart Thing

Not bad. The fact that it's on wheels makes it easy to sidle up near my burnt orange reading chair (garbage picked by my son. So proud!) and just drop the wireless mouse and keyboard in my lap to enjoy some Age of Empires II. With everything buttoned up, I started wanting some graphics to put on those blank white sides, so my wife will be creating vinyl decals with her handy-dandy Cricut, eventually. I'll post "Part 2" when that happens, along with any additional modifications that take place. For now, it sits in the living room, ready to be played.