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"Steve-O-Cade" major update to Bigbuffs Arcade Project
bigbuffs:
Couple of more pics and updates to add. I cut out a bezel for the monitor. I was trying to find some really hard cardboard or something similar to use for the bezel. I ended up finding a sheet of tagboard type stuff at lowes for 8 bucks so i went with that. It was a little harder than I wanted but it worked. I cut it using a box cutter which took quite a while and left my hand pretty sore but it turned out pretty good. I gave it some coats of black spray paint along with a few screws then I drilled out a hole in the bottom corner where the IR sensor on the monitor is.
I also cut the very last piece I had for the main construction of the cabinet. Then I trimmed out some holes for the extra monitor I want to use and the speaker holes as well. I'm planning on using the tagboard again on this hole piece to cover it up I want to find some type of perferated metal or plastic to use for speaker covers and also for fan covers in the back but I haven't found one yet. I also had to cut the top of the control panel back about an inch due to the new design of the cab.
I'm just starting to work with gbeef from arcadepix.com on some design ideas. Were just in the planning stages but I'm pretty excited about finally getting into some art ideas for the cab.
bigbuffs:
Here is an update of some things I have done to the cabinet. My work has slowed a bit and I have been working on a lot of smaller detail stuff lately. I had gbeef do some artwork for me and he just got that finished up and I am really happy with it. I cant wait to get it all printed and installed on the cabinet. It is going to look really good when its all installed! I had been looking for something to use for speaker covers for quite a while and I finally found something that worked really well thanks to our city wide clean up. I ended up using the some older monitor back covers. I cut off the parts that had holes and gave them some coats of paint. the larger of the two pics I used for the back cover of my cabinet. I thought it would work well to help vent and also allow the sound from the subwoofer to be heard better.
Here is the top front of the cabinet with the speaker covers installed and the the smaller monitor in place. Also the back of the cabinet as well with the vent installed on the bottom and some fan in place as well to help keep air circulating and keep everything cool.
I got these thumb screw things for the back cover of the cabinet and also some t-nuts to screw them into. I thought this would be good eas of access to the back. The thumb screws make it easy to take the back panel off and put it back on without the use of tools.
I also did alot of routering on the control panel. First I routed out spots on the bottom for the joysticks. I then used t-nuts again. This time I used them for mounting the joysticks. I drilled out a small are on the top of the CP so that the t-nuts would sit flush with the top. I also glued in each t-nut to help them stay in place better as I have found that MDF doesnt have as good as hold as most other wood does. Since this will all be cover by an overlay and plexigalss the t-nuts will not be seen. This will also make it easy to unistall the joysticks if necessary without doing any damage to the CP. It took me quite a while to come up with a way to mount the joysticks. I wanted the to sit nice and high but I also wanted to be able to remove them fairly easily. Because the CP in MDF you cant really just screw them right to the MDF because everytime you would unscrew them it would weeken the hold of the screws. I think what I came up with will work well but I may look into getting some longer joystick shafts at some point.
After hooking up my first 2 player CP and seeing what a mess the wires made I decided that I needed to find a way to make this 4 player CP much neater. The fact that I have all RGB buttons means that I need to use a lot of wires. Each button will need six wires run to it. With a total of 38 buttons that makes a lot of wires. I looked a lot at what other people had done to try to find a way to make this cleaner and I found someone who used a laminate to basically cover all the wires. I also read that alot of people used cat 5 to wire up everything so that is basically what I have dedcided to do. I have 2 LED control boards and 2 input control boards. So I basically just layed out on the underside of the CP where I wanted each board to go and them I routed out a path to run all of the wires. As you can see from the pics this stuff make a huge mess when routering but it should make for a nice clean look once everything is all wired up.
Right now I have some black and white templates of the artwork printed out and I am making some adjustments to make sure everything will line up correctly. I found a digital printing place in town where I live so I am going to go talk to them about possibly printing me out some graphics. I'm not sure if they will have backlit material though for the marquee so I may have to go the online route but I am hoping to get that taken care of this week. I am pretty much ready to get the computer back in this thing and star doing all the wiring for the CP. I have been working a lot lately so I havent had much time at all to get things done it just been a small bit here and there but I am planning on being about 95% done with this thing in about a month. The one thing I would like to do but probably wont get to for a while is hooking up some guns maybe using AIM trak so that I can play shoot em up games to but I know that I wont get to that for a while.
bigbuffs:
So I have done a ton more work on my project since last posting on here. I have taken pictures randomly throughout the process and I am finally coming back to my thread to update the progress of my cabinet. I will try to continue from where I left off but it has been a while so I may miss some things or possibly repeat some by mistake.
bigbuffs:
In all of my reworking of the cabinet I have decided to make the entire back remoavble so that if i need access to anything it will be much easier. I cut some squares in the top back piece for a couple more fans and also put a handle on to make it easier to move around. You can see what it looks like from the front and the back in these two pics.
I also got a power button that has an orange led light that will match the cabinet colors. The power button will go on top and right in the middle 2nd monitor.
While trying to tear apart my speaker remote It stopped working (which means I get to spend more money but what the hell I stopped keeping track) so I decided to order a whole new speaker set that has a much better volume and base control remote. Here is the speakers I ordered. You can see the nice seperate control it has for turning the volume and bass up and down and it also has a aux in and headphone jack.
bigbuffs:
When I got the speakers I took apart the controls (and managed not to break them this time). The front plastic piece came off fairly easily. I then cut a whole in my front panel that houses the speakers, 2nd monitor and power button. After I got everything in the panel situated how I wanted it, it was time to start fiberglassing. This was pretty much my first time doing this so it was pretty ugly and took a lot of sanding and bondo.
You can see how i decided to tape off the monitor and the volume controls which didnt turn out too well. There was a pretty noticable gap after I removed the tape so I ended up adding more bondo and filler after I removed the tape. Since I had the whole monitor glued into the back of the panel I removed it and tore it apart and one again manged to break something. I cracked the screen which really sucks because it is or at least was a touchscreen. Though I had no use for the touchscreen I just ended up cutting a piece of plexy to replace the cracked screen. After several layers of paint and sanding I turned out pretty good. Though you can see some unevenness in the sunlight.
You can see I removed the ring around the volume control and gave it an orange to match the artwork.
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