Managed to get in a full day today and made plenty of progress. I really feel I'm on the home straight now as most of the niggly/difficult problems have been overcome. However today wasn't all plain sailing....
I started off by trying to get the software side of things finalised so I could place the bezel in. Once it's in I don't get full Windows desktop so today was the day to get that sorted. However this morning I discover that for some reason the on board sound has totally decided to go on strike. I dunno how or why because it was working perfectly well a few weeks back in the house. But now in the garage it was a no-go. I tried all I knew in Windows and three different headsets/sound systems. Eventually I gave in and threw in a spare Sounblaster Audigy I had with updated driver... and voila! Normal service was resumed. Still don't know how or why the Realtek onboard stopped. But no matter now.
So I now got Mala shelled to boot straight into Shrunkenmaster's excellent Snaps with everything positioned nicely within the bezel aperture.
I also got to work "repairing" the little glitch I had at the bottom of the marquee. It was bugging me (I think I might be OCD) and it had to be fixed. This was done on and off throughout the day as I added bits of wood putty in and sanded appropriately.
Upper back panel trimmed and sound volume control installed. The sound of the 2.1 system is excellent! No distortion at full volume.... but ofc it won't run at that in the house.
This is where I got to at the end of the day. I ran out of terminals to finish this bit off but will get more tomorrow.
I'm nuch more happy with this marquee now. The problem was the bend towards the speaker panel was starting earlier on the left than on the right.. even though the panel underneath was straight. It meant that in the light the reflection on the bend made it look like the left side was shorter than the right. Yeah... I'm OCD!
In fact in this pic you can still see it's very slightly off. But it was much more pronounced than this before so I'm a happy bunny with it.
The marquee doesn't seem to light up at all in normal ambient light. I pulled down the garage door to make it darker and you can definitely see it glow. But it's nothing like a normal marquee would be. I suppose the original must have been similar, no?
Bezel sits nicely in there now. The acrylic is just taped in there on the underside with masking tape. But it can't drop out because it's flush with the base of the bezel and so rests against the glass of the monitor. I didn't want to glue it in just in case I ever want to change it if ever it gets scratched or something.
Got the CPO art installed too. This was much easier than I thought... I just hope the side art goes as smoothly.
There's dust everywhere in these pics. I try to keep stuff clean in the garage but it's a futile cause most of the time. The dust is just on the surface and isn't set in the paint or anything. A thorough clean is due when it's finally finished.
I also had a play with the yoke loosely installed when I was finalising the software. I did have a problem with this though as I couldn't get the yoke calibrated in windows. Basically button 4 was shorting out all the time which made calibration impossible (you have to press a button to move on to the next step). You could see the red button flashing on and off in the Windows property box for button 4 as I moved the yoke about. I eventually took off the handle of the yoke (after buying imperial hex keys) to find a little spring had got caught on a wire leading from the button and lodged itself in a perfect manner to short out the contact with the mounting screw! It was a spare spring that had dropped in there on assembly because all the other springs were intact. I'm just glad it was an easy fix 'cos it had me concerned as I was dismantling the handle.
I also found that on testing I had to tweak a few more settings in Mame. At first I was getting what seemed like lag on moving the yoke in the game. I did a bit of a search on here and Google and someone suggested that reducing the joystick deadzone from 0.3 to 0.1 would help. Well it did! So I repeat it here in case it helps someone else. I also had to reduce all the sensitivity settings in the game to 1. There were originally at something like 30, 50 and 70 (which seems like a huge reduction). Basically I could not hold the crosshairs steady in certain areas of the screen. It was jittering about all over the place at times. But now with the deadzone and sensitivities tweaked it's smooth as silk.