Ive made some good progress, so time for an update ...
The cabinet is very close to completion. I finally got a back door installed the other day.
Then was able to finish the painting is done for the most part ...
And the computer is mounted and loaded ... Apparently Windows XP has an exciting new look.
I had a bear of a time getting the ArcadeVGA card to work well with the setup, but after a bit of finagling, it is working well now. The only problem I have is most games will not run. I do not know if it is an issue with this card and the monitor it is attached to not supporting any weird resolutions, but I will troulbeshoot that a little more once I have the monitor in the cab and have everything pulled in the house.
Yesterday I sat next to the window like a 5 year old waiting for the ice cream truck, but the truck I was waiting for was brown, and it did have something pretty damned sweet on it, the marquee and control panel artwork!
So I ordered these through gameongraphix.com. The quality is very very nice.
Marquee:
Control Panel:
While the quality of the prints were good, I do have several gripes. The glue used to mount the marquee artwork to the plexy is crap. when I got it, it was full of bubbles and the corners were pealing up. It was also not mounted on evenly. I am going to peal it up and remount it with some better glue. The size is also off.
The control panel artwork was a whole other nightmare. Despite being rolled up in a nice hard round tube, It was severely bent in several spots leading me to believe it was bent before it was placed in the tube. If you look in the picture above you can see the two huge creases on either side of the trackball area. This made it ridiculously hard to get on the control panel correctly.
I am also going to have to say that while the material is pretty awesome, Unless you are mounting it on anything other than a totally flat piece of wood or plexi, dont use it. I place it and you can see every depression and other inconsistency in the surface. On mine there is a really obvious depression on the joystick and trackball plates. While not a game stopper, I am seriously debating remaking the whole control panel now. Since I have already routed the tmolding slots, that is what I would have to do if I wanted to go plexi. I am going to finish the project first then see how much it bugs me. It is only obvious if the light is right, which it may be under the glow of a monitor.
Anyway, enough bitching and back to the good stuff.
Lining up everything was a little tricky. I had the control panel printed with a little extra black around it so that I could trim it to size. I ended up putting a light underneath the control panel so that the holes would shine through the material and give me an idea of where the holes were before I stuck everything. Worked like a charm.
So after the control panel artwork was mounted, I got to mounting the buttons. Here's the final product, not perfect, but pretty damned sharp.
Its going to be a busy week now. I plan on mounting the monitor, getting the marquee in place, and mounting the speakers. If im lucky, maybe even a little wiring.