My modified coin door and reject buttons for mame

[Dragonman73]

I have been searching high and low for an example of what someone did for the "insert quarter" buttons for thier mame emulator with no luck. So here is what I did.

I wanted an authentic feel when playing arcade games and wanted to make use of the coin door that came on my cabinet. But I had to figure out a way to do it using a switch.

I bought a pair of red led pushbuttons from paradise arcade and a couple of coin door reject buttons from twisted quarter

http://www.paradisearcadeshop.com/en/230-red-led-convex-arcade-pushbutton.html

http://www.twistedquarter.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1116

The coin reject buttons were made and operated totally different that what was on my coin door originally, They were actually an all enclosed unit and had a center mounted pin that protruded from the back. It def wouldn’t work with the set-up currently on the door.



Here is a comparison of the two buttons…new one on the right. I had to file quite a bit off the edges to get it to fit into the housing of my coin door.



Ok so here is what I came up with, I decide to use one of the metal coin door brackets as a support for the led pushbutton and switch. I bent the tab at the rear to act as a “stopper” for the back of the switch



I basically laid the switch into the area on the bracket behind the reject button, when the reject button is pushed, the rear of the button will make contact with the led pushbutton and activate the switch. It’s a really simple but effective idea.




Here’s the assembly put together, I used a couple of hose clamps to secure the led pushbuttons to keep the nice and secure. I also epoxied the reject buttons in place so they don’t move around.



The idea is the led pushbuttons will light up and shoot the light through the coin reject buttons so it will light them up from the front. I ended up wrapping the led pushbuttons with black electrical tape to try and contain the light.

Here is a picture of the finished product from the front; I painted the casing with gloss black, and some black plastic paint on the coin button and change refund doors. Since the coin refund doors aren’t being used now…I epoxied the doors shut…so they are for looks now more than anything.

[Mac Green]

awesome thats a great idea

[LeedsFan]

Very neat job!   

I did a similar thing on my Star Wars project. But because that had a full yoke working through Windows I only needed those two extra "buttons" and I wasn't gonna buy a keyboard encoder for that. So I just hacked a mouse and used microswitches to interface with the coin rejects. Then I soldered wires from the microswitches to the mouse button solder points on the little pcb board. The coin door even had a useful little shelf at the bottom to sit the mouse pcb on.

[MagicMan]

Pic links are dead now