Turn an Old Laptop Into a Cheap Cardboard Mini Arcade Cabinet

I always thought it would be cool to have a small arcade cabinet to play games on but I was always discouraged by the price. I then had the Idea of why can I not build my own for cheap, so in this tutorial I will explain how I created my own working arcade cabinet out of an old laptop.

For this project you will need a large box that can be purchased for about $2, a screw driver, a knife to cut the cardboard, a roll of packing tape, and a old laptop.

The first step is to disassemble the laptop interior and screen from the outer shell. To do this take a screwdriver and unscrew the screws from the bottom of the laptop, a couple screws will be obvious to remove but the rest will likely be under any rubber parts on the bottom of the laptop, which can easily be removed by being pried at. The next step is to use a knife to pry off the keyboard from the rest of the shell. Try to get the knife under the corner of the keyboard panel until it pops up. Then gently unattached the rest of the panel. Gently pull up and disconnect any ribbon cables by pulling up on the small plastic pieces that keep them in place and don't accidently rip them. The next part is slightly different for all laptops but quite simple too, just find all the screws and detach everything from the shell of the laptop, make sure you keep the keyboard and trackpad for later. The final part is optional if you want the display to be removed from the shell. All you need to do is pry at the seam of the shell until it pops off just like with the bottom piece. Now, it is time to make the cabinet.

The next step is to create the cabinet itself, To do this you will need a rather large piece of cardboard, I found mine at a store for about $2. You will need to make two sides, a back, two pieces for the top front and for the top bottom, two pieces to go on the sides of the screen, and a top and bottom if you have enough cardboard. The image included shows the dimensions for my cabinet but you may need a bigger size if your laptop's screen is bigger than about 10.25" by 5.75". after cutting out the pieces you can put them together anyway you want but I used packing tape in my build. In my cabinet I cut a small slanted indent into the sides but that step is completely optional.

This step can vary severely based on what the inside of the laptop looks like. The first thing I did when starting this step was to put the trackpad and keyboard where I wanted them because they both had very short ribbon cables. After that I placed and taped the rest of the laptop close enough that it connected to both cables. I also had to make sure the display could be connected but it had a long cable so that was not as large of a problem. You may also want to make holes for charging and the power button or USB outlets if you are going to connect a controller to it using a wired connection.