Hasta La Gadget!

I know it’s a total luxury item that I have no business spending my hard-earned money on, but I’ve always wanted an arcade cabinet that I could load up with MAME and all of my favorite arcade games. But up until now, most of the cabinets out there were a little too tacky for me to actually have in my home. Now that I’ve seen these Retro Space arcade cabinets, I’ve got no excuse – except the money, of course.

These awesome retro-modern arcade cabinets come from designer Martijn Koch in The Netherlands. They each have a gorgeous 27-inch 1920×1200 LCD screen in the middle, as well as two arcade-grade Sanwa 8-way joysticks, real arcade buttons for each player, as well as a 6cm Sanwa arcade trackball and a single analog joystick for those games that support one.

Or if you’re a fan of games Arkanoid and Tempest like me, you’ll opt for the version with the Ultimarc SpinTrac spinner instead of the analog stick. Yes, please.

The cabinet has also got a pair of Canton speakers and a stereo T-amp. Keep in mind that this cabinet doesn’t include a computer – though they’ll be happy to custom fit it with a Mac Mini or Raspberry Pi for an added cost.

Prices range from €2,099 (~$2822 USD) for a slightly distressed yellow unit shown here to €2,499 (~$3360 USD) for the lovely anthracite grey model, so this definitely isn’t a cheap system. Never mind the fact that it may be cost-prohibitive to ship one of these outside of Europe.

I know Christmas is 11-1/2 months away, but I’m putting this on my list now.

Chairs are more than just pieces of furniture. At times, they can also be random yet awesome pieces of artwork, like the Enginering Temporality chair by Design Academy graduate Tuomas Markunpoika Tolvanen.

Tolvanen got the inspiration to do his project after witnessing his grandmother’s declining health due to Alzheimer’s. The project is actually a tribute to human fragility, and from the looks of it, Tolvanen was able to get that point across very well.

Perhaps the process to get the chair looking like that is even more striking than its final appearance.

So here’s what Tolvanen did: he cut up some tubular steel into rings and then joined them back together to form a semi-covering over the chair. And then he burned the entire thing. He says:

My pursuit was to give an object a memory, create tension and stage a play between the perfect, anonymous mass produced structural material and the imperfect of human being. The shell that is left caresses the vanished object, the memory of it, referring to the past.

It looks pretty awesome, doesn’t it? In addition to the chair, Tolvanen also created a cabinet, using similar techniques.

[via Design Boom via Chair Blog]