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Pacman style bartop cabinet build
monkeychunkuk:
Handy machine look forward to seeing it finished
sharpfork:
I really like the Pacman inspired profile.
I agree with PL1 that the CP seems a tight for two player. Fewer players or fewer buttons might help.
I'm a big xbox1/cab guys so I'm curious how you are doing video conversion and control encoding.
If you are going to do a removable CP, DB 25 connectors work well if you are going to use the same encoder(s) for both CPs. I've been testing some other solutions for switching controls that might make sense if you are looking for options.
What are you using for software on the xBox?
fieldofcows:
Hi Sharpfork,
I've seen on this forum that you are a bit of an xbox/cab expert and wondered if you'd comment. Take a look at this image:
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Ignore the messy wiring for the minute - I just threw it together to try it out. I currently have two DB25 connectors for the switches and joysticks. One for the CP itself to allow it to be swapped and one for the front panel (which cannot be swapped but makes it easier to work on the control board).
The control board itself is a very basic microcontroller board I made for work that contains 2x PIC18F4550. The original purpose for the board was to provide two USB device interfaces, one configured as a USB keyboard, the other as a serial port. You could then connect this to two computers and use the serial port to mimic keyboard input on the other computer. We used it to try out some automated testing but the board was redundant after that. It's perfect as an xbox interface as it provides me with 2 USB devices for 2 players.
To get the controller working, I found quite a lot of info on the Internet. Particularly this: http://euc.jp/periphs/xbox-controller.ja.html but I couldn't find any examples of anyone actually getting a microcontroller to work with an xbox. I borrowed a USB analyzer from work and connected it between the xbox and a real controller and worked out what I needed to provide as a handshake to get this working. It was pretty easy with access to a USB analyzer.
I've provided a few hard-coded profiles that need a bit of tweaking in the code that allows the joystick to be either digital, analogue or both switchable with a magic button combination.
As for the video conversion, I just got a cheap S Video to VGA converter from eBay. It is quite noisy but works quite well.
I'm using coinops 5 on the xbox. It's got far more games than I actually want but is so convenient that it made sense to go with it.
fieldofcows:
So to continue the build log...
I finished cutting out all the other parts of the cabinet and pieced it together. The slots on the side panels were so tight that once I squeezed the parts together it is rock solid without any sort of fasteners! Here's what it looks like with the monitor in place:
At this point we had a christmas party coming up with lots of guests that I thought might like to have a play so I thought it would be a good idea to throw some wires onto the control panel, shove everything in the back of the cabinet and give it a go. Indoors it went...
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It went down a storm. I'm sure if I made a couple more I could find homes for them!
And that's as far as I've got at the moment. The danger is that I can now play it so don't want to take it apart to finish it off! However, I must. It's going to be a few days before I can get any further with it but I'll keep this thread updated with my progress.
dextercf:
Eager to see how this turns out.. Looking Nice so far. Bit cramped cp, but if your ok i guess its fine.
👍
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