It lasted one night! Fracking one night! So I finished up 90% of it. Got everything done except finalizing and securing the layout of the interior and the Marquee and Control Panel artwork which I am ordering. But I had it up. I was working software with the pi. I had retro pie working but had some glitches I needed to work out. Monitor was pulsing like it had power issues, so I assumed it was hdmi issues with retro pie. But it ran games!
(the paper marquee is just a placeholder.)
I gave up on troubleshooting the monitor after I tried to adjust the config.txt to try and improve the hdmi performance. It didn't work and at one point I had the whole screen scrambled. That is when I learned Pi's default keyboard layout is GB not EN.
I was trying to insert "#"s but kept getting "£"s. So I had to learn how to set the keyboard to US. Learned a lot.
After getting the screen back (but still pulsing), my boys played some games ("Dad, you used to pay quarters for this") but they really liked it. I kicked them off so I could get the dual usb joystick encoder to work. I got emulation station to recognize the encoder as dual USB gamepads but I was done for the night. Ran out of time. I had just found how to get Retro arch to recognize the controllers in MAME but it was too late at night to do the work. Left it for today. The screen still flickered, and pulsed but it didn't impact gameplay.
All day at work, I couldn't wait to get home, fix the dual joysticks and get playing some 2 player games with my boys. Got home from work, turned it on and I got this:
Well, it doesn't flicker anymore! I don't think this is the retro pie white screen of death because the monitor exhibits this faded out image when the Rasberry Pi is disconnected. I think my monitor died. After all the special work to decase it. After building a custom bracket inside the cab to fit it. After repainting the bezel! One day, all I got out of it was one day. Everything was working or on its way to. It fit perfectly, side to side almost like the cabinet was designed for it. Now it is dead.
Right now I am surfing ebay looking for a 19 inch 4:3 monitor to replace it.
SO FRUSTRATING!