Severedhed:
I think as far as keyboard/mouse goes, I am going to go with the old hide behind the coin door in case of emergency tactic. Because, really that is the only time I would ever use them.
I like your ideas about the guns, but my coin door is functional (I got a SWEET deal on a nintendo cab door and already modified the mechs to take .984 tokens. Got 200 used tokens off ebay for 10 bucks, shipped. Its awesome, I plan on having an arcade pizza party when its built, give each guest 10 tokens when they show up
)
I want the guns to be plugged in all the time, so that when guests play the machine, they can figure it all out themselves. But I don't want the guns to clutter up the look of the cabinet when not in play. Looks like I am either going to 1) discretely mount usb ports under my CP, then I can plug in guns before people come over, or 2 build a drawer or small door with a cubby to keep the guns in. Depending on how big my CP is, I may mount holsters on the back of the control panels and then maybe have some sort of auto winding mechanism to reel the cords back in when the guns aren't being used.?
At the risk of looking noobish: What is VNC?
I am running Win XP on my cabinet. I read about the batchfile thing. Does it shut everything down gracefully?
Ideally I am looking for a way to shutdown my computer with my iphone. I know I can wake it with an app. I know you can set up outlook to run the batch file automatically, I thought about this option. Basically you set up an acocunt with POP access, then you set up rules in outlook so that if it receives an e-mail like "shutdown pc now" as its header, then it runs the batch file. I could set this up and then I could just send the e-mail to the cabinet from my phone and it would shut down. The problem with this is I would need to install outlook and have it running in the background all the time, and it needs to check the e-mail account every so often to see if it has the e-mail. I am not sure if this will effect my performance and such, and I would prefer a more elegant way
If you could give me more info on the VNC thing and perhaps let me know, if you know, if I could use my phone to shut it down that would be sweet.
Thanks,
see, i have two small kids in my house (and a third on the way) if i left my guns out, they would be destroyed.(plus my wife doesn't want the kids playing with guns). so the only time they get used is after they go to bed, so it is easier for me to plug them in when i want to use them.
as for the tokens, that is cool. i have my vertical classics cabinet set up to take tokens (or some quarter sized steel washers i picked up at lowes) but i dont really have enough of them, so i am always having to open up the coin door and dump the bin. so i set up the cab so the coin reject buttons can be pressed to add coins also. this keeps it relatively authentic, but eliminates the need for tokens.(which if my kids find them, they like to throw them all over the place (like down in the heat ducts).
on my 4player showcase cabinet, it was originally a 2 player cabinet and only had a 2player coin door, so i just added coin buttons to the front edge of the control panel box. it isn't as authentic, but I had to do something. since the coin door isn't being used, the coin box seemed like a good place to store the guns.
as for VNC, it is a free program you can install on your PC to remotely control it from another PC. there are actually several different versions, i prefer UltraVNC...
http://www.uvnc.com/you install it on your cabinet, take the option to register as a system service. then you set a password. you can then install the client on your other computer. you just open up the client, tell it to connect to the name of the other computer, enter your password, and it brings up the remote computer's desktop in a window, where you can use your keyboard and mouse to manipulate the remote PC. it is a very handy tool. It is similar to the windows remote desktop functionality, but with a few differences. remote desktop seems to respond faster over the interenet, but on a local network, speed shouldn't be an issue with vnc. when you connect via remote desktop, you take control of the PC, but if you walk over to the remote PC, it will be locked and unusable. with VNC, you connect and take control, however it doesnt affect the remote computer, so you can simultaneously control that PC locally and remotely. vnc also works on other operating systems.