NEO GEO Evolution (EVS-1) - Experimenting with DIY trackball

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BadMouth:
Been a while since I posted some progress. Not really much to show.
Got the cab moved upstairs & made a bracket for the audio amplifiers.

Above the subwoofer amp is the amp for the main speakers. Its power supply is mounted below.

The top amp is a little crooked and the screws I used to mount the power supply were too long.
Decided to let it slide since it's inside the cab.
This is what happens when I just want to make progress and don't have much time. :-\

The inside is shaping up nicely. PC components will be mounted on the door.

One of the reasons for the lack of progress on this is that my driving cab started getting the blue screen of death and had a few other issues that needed addressed just to get it back to normal. I swapped in the ram from this build and the bsod went away. Then I stuck the old ram from the driving cab in this build figuring I'd run some kind of memory test on it. Not sure how I managed such a stupid thing, but didn't get the RAM seated properly....not even close as a matter of fact. When I fired the pc up, the ram and chipset got super hot and the mobo fried. As if that weren't bad enough, while swapping components around to make sure nothing else was fried, I discovered that the brand new power supply that I planned to use in in the cab was DOA. It's under warranty, but will probably cost almost as much to ship as I paid for it.
So I have bad memory, mobo, & power supply. ::)

---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- happens.

.....ordered another cheap $45 mobo and will scavenge the other parts from existing builds.
Eventually I plan to build a screamer of a pc for this, but not until the cab is done and turns out well enough to justify it.

Seith:
:badmood: when it rains, it pours, doesn't it?

At least replacing all of those components won't be a huge fundsink.

BadMouth:
This progress was made a few weeks ago, but I'm regaining motivation for this project.
Now if I could just find a decent size block of free time. :-\

Waited for a $20 case w/free shipping to pop up on newegg:

Chopped and painted flat black (I really need to get better tools for cutting metal)

I now regret putting an outlet on the inside of the cab as it took up valuable space on the panel.

Used anti-vibration mounts on the HD. Not sure if they'll accomplish much.

Not much space left. The edge of the video card is just touching the coin box.
I'm getting some weird very slight shaking in the video. It's not noticeable in a game. Usually only notice it on the straight lines of dialogue boxes on the desktop. My guess is that it has something to do with the video card being next to all the electric connections, but I haven't troubleshooted yet. With two 120mm fans in the bottom of the cab and another one on the CPU cooler, this thing blows like a house fan. I'll probably add a fan controller to slow them down.

Also peeled the paper off my acrylic monitor bezel. The local glass shop only had one shade lighter than what I wanted, but they charged me half of what I was expecting for it. If there is a lot of ambient light in the room, you can see light reflecting off the shiny edges of the monitor, but I'm happy with it. I like the room dim when I play.

The current big holdups are that I can't get the parallel port working in Vista for monitor rotation and I can't find time to work on the CP because it gets dark so soon in the evenings now.

There's also the feature creep. Decided to make it more of a universal cab. I'm skipping the guns for now. Joysticks will have rotary added. ;D

TopJimmyCooks:
Get a cheap 4" grinder and some cut off wheels and you'll be cutting metal like a madman. if you don't use it a lot harbor freight is fine.

BadMouth:

--- Quote from: TopJimmyCooks on October 16, 2012, 08:52:00 pm ---Get a cheap 4" grinder and some cut off wheels and you'll be cutting metal like a madman. if you don't use it a lot harbor freight is fine.

--- End quote ---
Done.

I gave up on getting the parallel port working in Vista. Even if I'd got it working, there were still a couple other issues with it to overcome and I'd probably be starting over from scratch if I built a new pc with Win7.
So I bought the same Pololu USB simple motor controller that TopJimmyCooks used. Had it swapped in and working in a couple hours.
I highly recommend going that route.

Nearly all of my weekend was spent making Mala layouts while watching football. :dizzy:

Part of how I envision this cab working relies heavily on gamelists.
It will have dedicated gamelist <> buttons.
Mala has the option to switch layouts based on gamelist.
I incorrectly thought I could also rotate the monitor based on gamelists, so the shmups and classics layout would be vertical while most others would be horizontal. There's no option to do it that way, so I had to make a horizontal and vertical version of each layout.
I found it a bit disorienting for everything to be in a different place when Mala switched from horizontal to vertical and back.
.....so I made all my layouts square so they appear the same regardless of which way the monitor is turned and I only had to make one background. :P
(I didn't want marquees shown because a lot of the newer games don't have them or they had toppers that don't look very good displayed. Also all the Neo Geo games would have the same marqee)

I like some of them more than others. The favorites one is still a WIP.
At any rate, I'm sick of working on them, so they're going to be used until I feel like making others.

I took a few days off work this week, so hopefully I'll make good progress on the CP.

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