Finally working on them

[rovingmind]

After waiting what seems like forever, but is more like 7 years, i'm finally actually working on a physical cabinet.

I was given an emtpy (save for the burned in monitor) Carnival cabinet with no control panel, for the price of haul it away.

I was also able to bring home user Dustin Mustangs cnc cut cabinet "Whitey" that was a precurser test cabinet for his final project.

Due to life/child/ going back to school those projects were pushed to the back burner and relegated to "those things that take up space in the garage". 

I had picked up some generic things for awhile but never actually put any of them to use.  Now finally those things have been drug out, and both cabinets are on the active project list.

[rovingmind]

aaaand its been so long since i've actually posted a picture i forgot the format of the sizing tags.   edit... found it!
Anyhow, here is the control panel that has been sitting around forever waiting to be refinished and placed back into service. 
Originally i was going to weld in the button holes and redrill it.  The assistant holding the panel for the photo however is left-handed and since the panel already has 2 button holes on the left, i've decided to just make it a 2 button 8-way joystick left handed control panel. 

The thought is to tack mounting bolts to the backside of the panel so that i do not have to drill new holes in it. 

[rovingmind]

This box was me finally finding the old tokn kb16 encoder, and the joysticks/buttons at the same time and hooking a sample up. 
My daughter is hooked.  I've read all of the negative comments about the kb16 but its what I currently have.  Once i put diodes in line to all of the buttons, the ghosting issues went away for the games we have been playing with it.  Since its a single joystick 2 button cabinet i will probably use it until it dies.



The artwork on the carnival cabinet is going to be cleaned up on the side that is still there, and an original replacement marquee is hopefully on my christmas list.   My goal is to have its physical appearance to be as original as i can with the only difference being the joystick and an adjustment to the look of the control panel.  My wife will be painting the control panel once i get it cleaned, sanded, and prepped.

[rovingmind]

Rebuilding an uncompleted spinner project for the White cabinet.

[Slippyblade]

My younger daughter is a lefty as well, talk about a challenge!  Good luck on the project.

[rovingmind]

My younger daughter is a lefty as well, talk about a challenge!  Good luck on the project.

Thank you,

I've asked santa for a gallon of bondo for christmas.

[jennifer]

      You might want to send santa to the auto supply for that (and get a gal. of lightweight feather fill) instead.

[rovingmind]

Featherfill would be nice also, I hadn't even thought about that level of clean it up yet.  I've a couple of rough spots and some holes that kitty hair would be useful for also.  I probably need all 3. 

[rovingmind]

Today  a 3" trackball from a leftovers ebay auction showed up in the mail.
With some disassembly and cleaning and a shot of wd-40 the bearings and shafts spin well.  Sadly the mounting panel is tad bent.  Soon as i get the sticker residue off i'm going to whack it with a large board and see if i can straighten it out.

[rovingmind]

Here is the pic of the trackball from the ebay auction

[rovingmind]

and here is the mounting plate after cleaning, and straightening.  I want to powdercoat it, but there are a couple of spots that i dont think will look good enough enough.  I might just powdercoat the mounting bolts and paint this instead.  That will have to wait until i adjust the mounting hole on the control panel.  It was cut for a smaller trackball.

I testfit it into a cardboard box to see how flat it lies.   Luckily it was only bent in the middle a little bit, but not creased badly.

[rovingmind]

This is the poor sad Carnival cab, (not the receiver of the trackball).  I've a bit of space in the garage to create before i can work on repairing some of the structure of the cab itself.

Anybody near Toledo want a slightly burned in unknown quality arcade monitor?

[rovingmind]

I have nothing positive to report on this.  I started on a mouse hack today for the spinner I bodged together from random hardware store bits.  For some reason unknown to me i did not actually test the antiquated mouse that i disassembled for the soldering job.  when i plugged it in to do the inital test and see if it would register the printed out decoder wheel, I was getting hardware failure messages while win 7 was trying to register a driver for it.  On to the next mouse, and this time i'll test it before i take it apart.

[rovingmind]

I managed to get back into working on these this summer.  The control panel has been re-found, sanded and mounted into the carnival cabinet.  I've an lcd monitor sitting in it now, although i'm not completely happy with it.  Its what I currently have to work with.  I ended up going with a 4-way stick and 2 fire buttons even though my test box had an 8-way and 3 buttons.  The left-handed setup was a bit odd to get used to.  There is still quite a bit of work to do on it.

I never did get that spinner hack working.  However, i did manage to get a mouse hack on the Happ trackball functional this past weekend for the white cabinet.  The first mouse worked until i tried fixing a solder joint and made a stupid mistake.  I attempted to resolder one of the pins while it was still plugged in.  No damage to the computer, but the mouse died.  Luckily i had a belkin mouse and redid it a second time.  I went ahead and added some wiring harness to the mouse buttons while i was at it.  There is always room/need for more buttons.  I don't know where i'm going to put the actual buttons though.  Since they are buttons for the mouse, i'm thinking about putting them above and 1 on each side of the trackball mounting plate.

I havn't decided if i'm going to re-visit making a spinner.  There is a rather nifty looking model file on Thingiverse for an arcade spinner that supposedly fits into a standard button hole.  I actually downloaded one of the files on there to get button nuts.  I printed out half a dozen to replace some of the metal ones I have. 

[Wyo]

Glad to see you back at it! 

[rovingmind]

These are the arcade nuts that came off the 3d printer.


Hello amateur routing skills.  Look, finally made it around to opening up the existing joystick holes to fit the 8-ways.  I went back and forth over
ordering joysticks to fit the holes already there.   In the end it came down to being able to actually work on the cabinet this year and using what i've already had stuffed in boxes.  I do plan on going to all blue buttons in the future, but for now I can wire up the control panel using mainly red and black.


Here is a very poor quality pic of the lefty control panel.  At the moment the marquee is 3 sheets of paper printed out and taped to the back of plexiglass.