Also, I have this partially built arcade cabinet that I can fit a phone and a tiny controller inside! Note that I am, at best, a novice woodcrafter and have little idea of what I'm doing, beyond occasional YouTube videos and advice from the local hardware store. This project has been improvised, seat-of-the-pants stuff... for instance, I was going to build the box myself until I found one at a hobby store, preassembled. Okay, sure, I'll just add a marquee at the top, feet on the bottom, and cut an arcade-y shape in the middle.

Basically how this works, or will eventually work, is that a phone sits on a shelf in the center of the cabinet, with a brace keeping it from falling out. (More work will need to be done to stabilize it.) There's a hole in the center of the shelf, where a cable can be fed through and connected to the USB port on the bottom of the phone. A tiny plywood cabinet holds and stabilizes the equally tiny joystick, Replicade's surprisingly responsive Street Fighter II controller. I was going to put the controller really close to the phone for the sake of visibility, but cable management became a problem, so I had to build a floor under the feet (not shown; the wood glue is still drying!) to give it some distance.

This has been a fun project, and will likely look a lot better once I give it a coat of paint. There's already a slot at the top of the system for a glass (or plexiglass) marquee, and I'm giving some thought to really going all out with this and putting a string of LED lights behind it, along with a second USB port (or dare I suggest it? A USB HUB!) so the phone can be further secured and never needs to be removed. It cost me $5 with an extra $10 for self-administered repairs. It's basically a toy; it might as well stay in that box forever.

Also up for consideration: connecting a couple of tiny speakers to the aux port at the top and hiding all of that under a hatch on the marquee. The sky (and my tight budget) is the limit!