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Here is pretty much the last step of my odyssey, the wood work, finishing and wiring of the control panel, I did manage to finish this part all in one day, but do get it done that quickly I had to abandon my idea to wire the ipac and buttons to DB 15 connectors, and just hardwired the whole damn thing.
All of the holes were drilled already, so then I routed out the joystick areas, to allow a bit of a fudge factor, I just routed by hand and made the openings a little bigger, this made it very easy to install the joysticks.
I picked up a trick for mounting these bad boys the day before I did it on the web somewhere, instead of using a pencil to mark the bolt holes for the joysticks, place the base where you want it, secure it down (being very careful to make sure it is straight so left means left!) then drill a small pilot hole through the bolt hole, I found this to be much more accurate than when I would just mark the openings with a pen.
Cutting and measuring the contact paper (boy do I love contact paper!)
Contact paper affixed and ready to be cut to shape.
Contact paper cut and the button holes scored to allow placement of buttons.
Here the buttons are placed in the holes, the ones on the left have been secured with the bolt, buy the button wrench from happs when you get your buttons, it makes things a snap. The micro switches have not yet been attached, and the picture I took of that was messed up, so take my word, there are microswitches on the buttons.
Here are the mounted micro switches and all of the ground wires connected. I used a regular terminal block and then made a wire that went to each connector on one side of the block to provide a common ground.
The world famous I-PAC keyboard controller seen with the ATI card I decided to buy for 79 bucks on sale, this card provides a better image than the PC-TV converter I was using with my old TNT card. Old ATI cards with S-video out should do the trick as well, but this was the oldest one I could find.
Despite my best efforts to keep everything organized, the wiring turned into a bit of spaghetti, which got even worse when I had to re-do a couple of wires while troubleshooting this phase. If I built the DB15 connecters like I was going to this would have been a lot cleaner... take the time to do it right!
The hinge was screwed down in place on the front panel, the coin doors wired and finally the Moulding is being put in place on the control panel. Of course I've been doing extensive play testing of the control panel during this whole process :-)
Here's a look at the control panel mounted and tilted up, there's even enough clearance on that shelf to allow me to store things like the keys for the coin doors.
Finally I placed the little volume dongle that came with the speakers in the gap that was the result of me not paying attention when I first cut out the panel.... yeah I MEANT to do that! :)
NEW!
I decided the control panel was a little dull, so I made some adhesive stickers out of some of the side art files and placed them on the panel. I re-colored the MAME logo purple by request of my best gal Trish who has put up with the last month of hammering and sawing and cursing and making messes all over the place. I also installed a leftover piece of marquee holder at the top of the control panel, I still have too much of a gap between the Lucite and the control panel to stick a quarter in to reserve the next game like the old days, but I can use the trim to hold them. This is also the point of the project where I wish I spent the extra hour or so making a lexan/lucite control panel cover before I installed the buttons. I will leave it uncovered at this point and see how things go, a lucite cover is definately on the list for CP 2.0. |
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