All of the nuts and
bolts are just finger tight right now, but I put it all together for a
post paint test fit and to get an idea of how cool it's going to look
when I'm finished.
Since everything was
out of it I decided to cut a couple more holes in the base so that the
bottoms of both joysticks were accessible. I then reinstalled the
motherboard, power supply and compact flash IDE adapter card.
Next up, I installed
the arcade control panel support brace, X-Gaming BYO Arcade controller
board and the monitor into the cabinet.
I used Weld-On 16 to
mount both speakers onto the acrylic panel and then clamped them down...
Weld-On 16 dries clear and is some seriously wonderful industrial stuff.
The speaker panel and
the monitor overlay acrylic panel are installed. I cut some of the
bottom right monitor acrylic panel out so that the monitor controls can
be accessed when the arcade controls panel is removed.
Below is my nearly
completed arcade controls panel, for now it is just loose fit onto the
cabinet, but both joysticks, all sixteen buttons and the Matrix Orbital
display are installed.
Here's another look at the
arcade controls panel from a top down perspective...
And a look at the back
side - twenty four micro switches still need to be wired up to the BYO
arcade controller board, but not far now.
I decided to change up
the monitor overlay acrylic panel a bit, the clear center section had to
go. My reasoning - first it eliminates the reflection/glare it
caused, second it fixes and prevents any existing or future scratches, and third if the
screen itself ever needs to be cleaned the whole thing won't have to be torn
apart now to do it.
Changing things up
seems to be a trend as this project gets closer to completion - with
that said I have decided not to use the X-Gaming BYO arcade controller
kit. It was really nice of X-Gaming to send me one to check out,
but the convoluted connection method combined with the confusing mess of tabbed wiring and
cryptic instruction set
started me thinking that a pre-wired controller might be less than optimal
for my needs.
The picture below
however shows the single biggest reason why I am not going to use it,
the wiring is just too short to work. Sure, I could modify
the wiring by adding some length to it, but the BYO arcade controller kit is supposed to be
a ready to
go solution right out of the box - simply stated it kind of sucks.
Below shows the
new plan - I bought an I-PAC2 arcade control interface, a wire stripper
and a hundred pack of terminal connectors and I will wire it
myself. I like that the I-PAC2 has a simpler single cable method
of connecting to the PC over the X-Gaming controllers cables, but the
best part is that the button and joystick wiring will be a lot cleaner.
Project: Troy's
Arcade - Page 5
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