Nintendo cabinet build - Wreck-It Ralph

[UnclearHermit]

Think the smaller font looks better...

[UnclearHermit]

And here it is with the button holes marked, so you can see I've got a few mm around to take the button surround.  Worst case it overlaps the black slightly, which is fine, but doesn't go outside it.  I might just have got away with this if I was using the Nintendo buttons, since they're just that little bit smaller, but I think this is looking okay.  Thoughts welcome!

[vertexguy]

And here it is with the button holes marked, so you can see I've got a few mm around to take the button surround.  Worst case it overlaps the black slightly, which is fine, but doesn't go outside it.  I might just have got away with this if I was using the Nintendo buttons, since they're just that little bit smaller, but I think this is looking okay.  Thoughts welcome!

I like this one a lot better!  Looks more consistent and not forced in place.

[javeryh]

I like the new version.  The font looks weird in a vacuum at 2 different sizes but I'm staring at my DK right now and that is exactly how it should be.  I wonder if it is missing a third color?  The Jump button on the DK has an orange/yellow background.

Also, maybe it is compression but the lettering looks a little different between 1-Player and 2-Player (the dash looks like it is a different size ad the lettering doesn't look 100% level to me).  Could be my monitor though.

[UnclearHermit]

Thanks all.

The "third colour" - jump/fix have a cream background rather than the white that's on P1/P2.  The cream/brown theme replaces orange where it appears in the button background and the vertical lines at the bottom of the DK control panel, and matches in with the building/window colours used on the bezel. 

Good spot on the P1/P2 font, that dash definitely looks different!  I know the font is the same because I checked it when I was working on the new jump/fix button layout, but I'll check out why that dash is looking different.  I'm trying to go over all of the artwork now for final checks ready to get them printed.

[meyer980]

Dynamic fonts (which most computer fonts are nowadays) often adjust the length of the dash based on the letters around it. Probably what's happening to you. If it bothers you, you could try using an em-dash instead of the dash next to 0, or just leave a space and draw the dash in yourself.

That's a pretty keen eye javeryh has!

[javeryh]

That's a pretty keen eye javeryh has!

Ha!  I think I'm just super anal... and I love iterating on designs.  There are always small improvements that can be made - the hard part for me is figuring out when it is "good enough".

[UnclearHermit]

No, really glad you noticed because it would REALLY annoy me when I finally spotted it on the final product 

I've no idea what I was looking at before because when I look more closely it's clearly not the same font.  It's been 8 months since I touched this so I can't remember all the details, but some of the bits came from the work others in the form of DK panels and some bits I had to create because they were unique to what I was doing here.  Spending two minutes looking at it you can immediately see the font differences (the P, for instance, is more curved and joins the vertical in a different place).  So I'm going to have to adopt a consistent font and change the P1/P2.  Differences below for comparison.  Middle is original, top is matching font with default spacing, bottom is with spacing adjusted to roughly match original width.  Trouble is if I reduce spacing then it's inconsistent with jump/fix.  I'm going to try with various consistent settings to see how it looks best.

[UnclearHermit]

Right, here we go, fonts now consistent, which obviously looks a bit different.  First pic is how it was, second is same font but with default spacing, third is with spacing to match the "Controller" area that already existed, which slightly reduces spacing on P1/P2/Jump/Fix.

[UnclearHermit]

Sorry for the different size images, which just makes comparisons hard.  I was just screen grabbing for ease.

I'm trying to decide if I'm 100% happy.  I'm so used to how P1/2 USED to look that I might just be not liking "that it's changed" rather than not liking the change!

[javeryh]

Can you make the 1-Player and 2-Player bold?  Might approximate the look of the first picture better.  I do think the design is improving with these new changes.

[UnclearHermit]

Can do (and thanks), just not sure if I'm then doing it to match how it was or because it looks better.  It also makes things inconsistent again, of course, although they're already different sizes.  As a test, this is with P1 bolder and, for good measure, the same boldness applied to "Fix".

[javeryh]

Hmmm... I know exactly what you mean.  I think the bold looks slightly better but it is further from the original design.  Here’s a shot of my DK for reference.



The P1 and P2 fonts are tiny and JUMP is huge in comparison.  Maybe it's the JUMP that needs to be bigger/bold?  Also, the border is a completely different thickness (plus the triangular border but I get why you would eliminate that).  Hmmm... if it makes you feel any better, there's no wrong choice.  I don't notice any of this stuff when I'm playing or when I'm just hanging out in the basement.

[ChanceKJ]

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[UnclearHermit]

Thanks.  That's actually what I've been doing over the last couple of weeks, albeit with slightly less elegant sheets of A4 stuck together.  A key thing I needed to see was whether my bezel obscured the screen at all at the bottom, since the screen mount isn't original.  It's fine, but it's raised another question.  According to information online the bezel should be 514mm high.  But the Gaetan plans show a gap of 524mm from wood to wood, and the actual gap is even larger because the lower bezel retainer gives about 8mm more, so I'd need 532mm.  Now I know the bezel has some space above it where it's clamped into place from above, and the top retainer covers about 15mm maximum.  But that still means I'd need 532-15mm MINIMUM (so 517mm) and that would only just graze the top retainer.

Am I missing something here?  I can only think that I need to order the bezel slightly higher because otherwise it's just not going to fit, but it must mean there's a measurement off somewhere.

Also, how does the marquee bracket hold the marquee?  Gaetan's plans show the marquee shelf (the bottom of the marquee) has an angle on it, so I'd assumed the marquee would sit in line with that angle IN FRONT of the shelf.  But the marquee bracket I have from Mike's Arcade only has a very small angle on it.  If I fit the bracket so that it's pushed tight against the shelf then it'd leave a gap that might just take the bottom edge of the marquee, but it'd be tight and only hold about the first mm of the marquee.  Does the bracket get pushed back this far (looks like it in photos) or does it sit slightly forward so that the whole of the marquee base can sit inside it?  The picture hopefully illustrates - black is the marquee shelf with the angle at the front, red shows how the marquee bracket creates an angle between it and the shelf.  I don't know whether the bracket is supposed to be taller so that the marquee sits ON the shelf or if it's supposed to create a gap that lets me put the marquee IN FRONT of the shelf.  Thanks!

[ChanceKJ]

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[UnclearHermit]

Sort of!  It's those pictures I'd used to try and figure this out already.  The confusing bit is that this https://flic.kr/p/rPWrci picture, taken from underneath, seems to show that the bracket is pushed back so it's flush with the shelf.
 But in https://flic.kr/p/qT9jrZ there's a gap on the top that the marquee can fit into, and it looks wide enough that the marquee will sink into it quite a way down.  If I do the same with the part I have then the gap might just take the very bottom marquee, but the gap would narrow and prevent it from sinking in more than about a mm.  I can only think that I need to pull the bracket out a bit and that maybe the repro part isn't quite the same as an original.

Thanks for the offer to measure.  It would really help if you could confirm the distance between the top of the wood that holds the lower bezel bracket and the underside of the marquee shelf.  If it's really 524mm then I don't understand why a 514mm bezel doesn't just just fall out when it sinks into the recess in the lower bracket 

[UnclearHermit]

There also seem to be differences between original cabinets, which just makes it fun for hapless people like me who are trying to copy them    Looking at Chance's photo at http://www.arcadecab.fr/Donkey%20Kong/Photos/ChanceKJ/035.jpg you can see the diagonal batten meets the top of the marquee shelf about 7mm from its front.  So that might suggest that the marquee itself sits flush against the batten, which you'd think would be the idea, but that would leave the marquee sitting on the shelf whereas I THINK it goes IN FRONT of the shelf into the bracket.

But if you look at http://www.arcadecab.fr/Donkey%20Kong/Photos/Buick455/IMG_2364%20(Medium).JPG then the batten isn't set back and meets the front of the marquee shelf.  So in that photo it's more obvious that there's no way the marquee could sit ON the shelf.

[UnclearHermit]

Thought I'd just get on with it - I've placed the side pieces in alignment with the shelf  

[ChanceKJ]

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[ChanceKJ]

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[ChanceKJ]

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[ChanceKJ]

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[UnclearHermit]

Thanks.  I've looked at so many photos of all of this at various point, and even went over the bezel lock arm stuff when you detailed it in one of your threads.  So this bit I understand in terms of how the bezel is supposed to fit, but when there's a gap of 524mm between the wood surfaces and the bezel is only 514mm then obviously that leaves me a 10mm gap to fill.  The upper bezel bracket seems to give me maximum of overlap, so I'd be overlapping by 5mm.  That would be fine, but the BOTTOM bezel bracket was about 8-9mm of depth in it.  So if the bezel drops 8mm into the lower bezel bracket then the bezel won't each REACH the upper bracket.  I coud pack out the lower bezel bracket or I could order a taller bezel, but if either of these is needed then I'm guessing the measurements I have must be out by a few mm somewhere.

If you wouldn't mind measuring between the lower bezel wood surface and either the underside of the marquee shelf (or the bottom of the upper bezel bracket, which is probably easier) then that would be really useful.  On paper the wood to wood distance is 524mm, so wood to bracket would be about 509mm in theory.  I'm guessing it's slightly less in reality.

[ChanceKJ]

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[UnclearHermit]

This is all really useful, thanks, and apologies for asking again - I'd somehow completely missed that you'd posted three times in a row 

The pictures are all really useful though.  I've gone through a lot of your photos previously looking for details, but there are still a couple of little things I'd not seen before.  The 524mm measurement seems to be exactly as described on the plans, but it's great to see it "in the flesh".  That said, you've then confused me because your first picture with the fixed ruler shows it at 524, but your later one between the red and green dots seems to put it at 520!  But your rules one is where I've been measuring anyway, so seems to be the confirmation that I needed.  That aside, my missing few mm could easily come from your picture showing the lower bracket sitting a couple of mm above the wood, and the fact that your upper bracket comes down 18mm whereas mine seems to only come down 15mm.  Any one of these would give me the extra few mm I need to have the bezel make contact with the upper bracket.  So I can potentially just pack out the upper bracket mounting holes to give me a mm or two, or pack out the lower bracket to do the same.  I think I can just about make a standard size bezel fit with those minor adjustments.

For the horizontal upper support piece of the marquee, yes, that was a bit I'd gone over ages ago to make sure I understood what needed to go where.  I've had the piece of wood sitting around all year waiting until I had the two side pieces in place that would give me its final position.  With those in place, that finally got attached last night (below).  For the equivalent support pieces for the bezel I need to decide if I can figure out their positions accurately enough now or whether I'll wait until I have the bezel so I can attach them in exactly the right place.

Other than the painting saga, the thing that's taken forever in this build is understanding all of the little details about positioning or how x connects to y.  With an original cabinet to-hand I could have saved days of pouring over Internet photos trying to find the information.

Thanks again for taking the time to get those measurements and photos.

[UnclearHermit]

Somehow back on 29th November I uploaded a bunch of images about my monitor mount and then never posted them.  I really thought I'd written this stuff, so maybe I wrote it and forgot to post.  Or maybe it's posted and I can't see it, in which case you'll be reading this twice

I needed a way to mount the monitor that I have, so I took a bunch of measurements around the monitor to try and get a mount that wasn't too much of a cutout from the monitor, to keep as much strength as possible since it's taking the weight and it likely to bow.



The whole thing then got roughly cut out with the jigsaw and then tidied with the router.  The side holes are handles, obviously...




After painting and then bolting on to the monitor...



Then mounted into the cab (the paper is temporary, just to stop the mount scratching the cabinet sides as it's slid into position. I should probably have made it a bit narrower...




The top of the monitor frame bolts through to the L brackets that I attached to the cabinet sides in the past.  The bottom is held happily in place by gravity, but just in case anyone decides to tip the cabinet forward I wanted to secure the bottom in place.  So I secured a piece of wood to the rear of the frame on each side, then I screwed upwards into that block from through the shelf that the monitor is sitting on.  The monitor and the shelf aren't at 90 degrees to each other, so getting that piece of wood into place in the right place was a bit fiddly, but it seems nice and solid now it's all done. 

[meyer980]

Wow, that's one clean looking CRT. Is it brand new?

[UnclearHermit]

No, not new, and unfortunately I didn't realise it was quite grubby until it was mounted in the cabinet.  It wasn't like some you see, and hasn't been through any brutal clean - the thought of tipping water all over a monitor just messes with my head.  I gave it a bit of a wipe over to get to stuff I could get to easily, but there will be plenty of out of reach areas where it's still pretty grubby 

Apart from a scratch on the screen it's looking pretty decent, although I'm still finding dirt.  That ribbon cable, for instance, looked okay until I happened to wipe it and realised it was actually covered in black grime.

[UnclearHermit]

I've been spending odd moments over the last month or so on wiring.

The two service buttons, which are mounted out of sight on the wood below the control panel, will act as power and a "back" button.  They're LED buttons, so although out of sight they will light to indicate when they're relevant.  When the cabinet has mains power applied the power button will light, so there's at least a clue how to turn it on.  Once the power button is pressed (and the PC inside powers up) then its light will extinguish and the "back/esc" button will light instead.  There are probably ways I could have done this using the uhid, but it's easy enough (in theory, although I spent time in advance testing theory with batteries etc.) to do with a relay. 



I'm using a length of cat5 for these buttons, since it was an easy way to get a number of wires through the cabinet and saved money on extra wire (I have cat5 lying around).  The power to the LEDs is supplied from the permanent 5V line on the ATX power suply, which I spliced into for ease.  This means that the 5V is present when the PC is turned off, and it's only when the PC gets power that I then take 12V from the PC to switch the relay, which then switches the 5V over to the other LED.



I've also wired the other end of the aviation connector that's attached to the coin door wiring, and attached a more than adequate length of wire to it all that I can trim back once I terminate it all to the uhid etc.



More immediately exciting, and a simpler bit of wiring - the marquee light is powered!



For the power input for the cabinet I'm attaching a socket to a piece of wood that is mounting where the switch would be on a normal Nintendo cabinet.  A Nintendo cabinet power wire would come as a captive wire through the middle bottom of the rear door, but I'd rather have a removable cable run separately since all the cabinet innards are non-standard anyway.  Because the socket is getting sandwiched between two pieces of wood I've had to recess the mount to accommodate it.



For the PC itself I'm using an old one that I've decased and will be mounting it on a piece of MDF that will sit roughly where the cabinet PCB would go.  I've attached standoffs to this and also cut a hole for the rear of the CPU/fan mount to allow it to breathe.  I'm not planning any ventilation at this stage because I'm hoping there's enough space inside the cabinet to stop it getting too hot.  If I need to do something then I'll have to vent somehow through the rear panel.





In place, with lots of wiring still to do.  There's plenty of soldering being done, but I'm using connector blocks in many places so that it's easier if I ever need to change the PC.

[UnclearHermit]

Don't think I ever posted this photo with a paper print of marquee and bezel in place to test...

[UnclearHermit]

Observant people will have noticed the absence of the bezel in that last post 

[UnclearHermit]

A few other updates.

Made a mounting board for the isolation transformer and got wiring in place.



Attached the speaker panel, which is looking pretty nice I think.



I have most of the wiring in place now, run in the right places and mostly tidied up.  A little more to do here, but I've also got final testing to do before I finalise everything.  I think I mentioned before that it's using a smart strip which, all being well, will power up everything when the PC powers up.



In bigger news, the cabinet is now inside, finally.  It's been so cold/damp here that it wasn't going to be doing the cabinet or the monitor any good, so hopefully it's survived.  It's going to be inside for about a week before I even think of powering it up.



The bad news is that the "towel damage" (inflicted when it was lying down having the second side painted) isn't gone.  I couldn't see it at all when it was in the poor lighting of the garage, but as soon as it was in daylight it was obvious.  On the plus side it's just one of the strips that remains, and that one isn't surprising because it was the deepest of the lot.  It's disappointing, but I accepted this risk months ago when I finally stopped the painting saga.  Any more sanding risked going all the way back to wood, and anything else would have meant more painting/sanding etc. and I couldn't even risk lying it down to do that.  So maybe I'll position that side out of daylight, maybe I'll just see how much I notice it in real life.  I captured this photo with a monitor light in reflection so that the damage can be seen. 



Finally, the power inlet, painted and mounted in place.

[Wyo]

Looks so good!!!!!   

I love this project! (I think I say this to much, haha)

[ChanceKJ]

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[UnclearHermit]

Thanks 

A quick marquee question. 

The lower shelf for the marquee has a slight angle on it that's in line with the whole angle that the marquee sits at.  The bracket that holds the marquee is actually angled in the opposite direction, so where the two piece meet it creates a V shape.  The very top of this V is JUST bit enough to accommodate the marquee, but it's barely going to hold in place.  Is the bracket supposed to be pulled forward slightly so that the marquee can drop down and be supported by the horizontal surface of the bracket (so it's level with the UNDERSIDE of the marquee shelf) or is the bracket supposed to be pushed all the way against the shelf so that the marquee is JUST held by the bracket and it's effectively level with the TOP of the marquee shelf?  Downside of having it in the bottom position seems to be that there will end up being a bit of a gap between the top of the bracket and the marquee (thanks to the V the gap gets wider).  I don't quite understand why the bracket angle doesn't match the shelf/marquee angle!

Short version - does the bottom of the marquee sit at red or green?! 

[ChanceKJ]

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[javeryh]

Green for sure but if you are using the right bracket the bottom part also holds the top of the bezel in place like this:



As you can see there are no gaps and everything fits nice and snug.

[UnclearHermit]

Thanks both!  Just wanted to be sure, since the angle of the bracket doesn't make it completely obvious.

In bigger news, WE HAVE POWER!



Ignore the colours, it's just bad room lighting (and photography).

It's a big moment.  All the major electronics are working, so I press the magic power button, PC starts up, and a couple of seconds later the monitor and marquee light fire up.  So the smart switch thing seems to be doing its job, although I had ONE time where the machine had been running for about a minute and it powered off the light and monitor again, so it must have thought the PC wasn't busy or something.  Really hoping that was a one-off, because the whole approach to cabinet power fails (no point having a power switch for the PC if the monitor and marquee are always on!).

I'd done some work early last year on setting up CRT emudriver and so some bits came together quite quickly.  I've got groovymame and attractmode in place but only vaguely tested, but at least it meant I could fire up a game and get a picture and judge results.  I came a bit more unstuck with Wreck It Ralph (formerly Fixit Felix  ) because it sent the monitor out of range and I hadn't immediately realised the cause. 



Even after closing the game my monitor remained out of play until I reduced the H size on the monitor (resulting in "double desktop" but at least I could see).  It turned out that my desktop resolution had been happily running at 640 X 480 interlaced from my work last year, but the Fixit game seems to switch resolution (assuming to 640 X 480 progressive, although I could have this wrong) and then leaves me in that state.  ArcadeOSD to the rescue got my desktop back as it was, once I figured out the problem, leaving me with the problem that my Wreck It Ralph cabinet might not be able to run Wreck It Ralph.  Luckily I found that by changing the settings of the game to NOT run full screen that it still can run "full screen" but doesn't mess with the resolution.  So things are looking good. 

In slightly worse news, it appears that monitor (not Sanyo, it's a Wells Gardner 19K7689) isn't in perfect health.  There's a vertical band on the left side of the screen (in vertical orientation) where the colour is off and where the image is compressed.  You can see it on the left three digits of WiR here:



The colour band is more noticeable in other games - here's AttractMode:



And Bomb Jack's calibration grid clearly shows the distortion:



I suspect that someone knowledgeable is going to tell me that I need a cap kit (or worse).  Can't say I'm particularly looking forward to that as an option.  I'm looking at the circuit board and trying to figure how practical that is to remove without removing the monitor from the cabinet, and I'm wondering at my skill at replacing what looks like quite a LOT of capacitors!  I've done a couple on a boiler PCB in the past, but if you change TWO and something doesn't work afterwards then you have limited places to look.  But the biggest challenges is probably even GETTING such a kit in the UK.  It's pretty expensive to ship stuff in, and thanks to some new customs laws a load of companies outside of the UK have now stopped shipping here completely.  How practical is it to identify and source the capacitors manually?

Of course, if someone points out that the issue has some much easier solution then that's even better    I'm also tempted to come back to this particular problem later since it'd be nice to finish this project and then tinker later rathen that add a load of delay and risk at this point.  Obviously I don't want to create worse issues by leaving it though, if that's possible.

Still, it's still a big moment for this project.  The end is in sight.  Now, need some controls....

[meyer980]

Looking great man, really nice work!

I can't help you on sourcing the parts, but there are lots of good videos on YouTube showing how to do a cap kit. I'm especially a fan of John's Arcade. He often shows the full process, making some videos 1+ hours long but good for learning.

You're getting awfully close to a finished cab!