X-Men 4-player [done]

[javeryh]

If you are good with it being hidden, and if you presumably have 4 coin inserts, you could turn the coin returns into the start buttons.

I second this.  I do this for all of my cabinets now - still like reaching down to put in a quarter to play but this is the next best thing.

[processedmeat]

I third this.  I also designed some 3d printed microswitch holders for the coin reject buttons to make them easier to hook up and use.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4543135

If you are good with it being hidden, and if you presumably have 4 coin inserts, you could turn the coin returns into the start buttons.

I second this.  I do this for all of my cabinets now - still like reaching down to put in a quarter to play but this is the next best thing.

[Arroyo]

Woodworking is very well done edekoning, you can tell you put time into it.  Curious to know what amp you are going to use to drive the speakers as I have 4 ohm car speakers in mine as well.  Can't quite decide which direction to go.

[edekoning]

Thanks for the coin door suggestions, I'll definitely check those out once I have actually received them (6 weeks and waiting  ).

Curious to know what amp you are going to use to drive the speakers as I have 4 ohm car speakers in mine as well.

Seemed a lot of people go with a cheap Lepy amp, f.e. the LP-2020A. But those are not that easy to get over here. So I went with a slightly more expensive option: Fosi Audio TB10A: https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Amplifier-Receiver-Integrated-Speakers/dp/B076P2VS9H. It does not go very loud, but I think it will be enough.

[edekoning]

Worked on the control panel box, and securing it to the cabinet.

[edekoning]

The pocket screws that I used on the control panel box intersect with the The T-molding slot on the sides. I'll need to cut some notches in the T-molding to make it fit. This is also the reason why I pushed the back-panel on the cabinet 1/2" inwards.

[edekoning]

Also did some other random things today.

The top back panel has carrying handles, but whenever I use them to tilt the cabinet, the wood bends a bit. This is due to the cab being so heavy, and the fact that the wood is only fastened on the sides. So I decided to add some additional pocket screws to attach it to the top panel. As the surfaces are angled here, I used screws meant for 0.5" thick wood, to ensure they won't come out the other side

I added a wooden strip to bottom of that same panel, to support the back door. I then routed out some wood for the cam lock in the door to catch on to. To the bottom of the door I also added a wooden strip that catches behind the lower back panel. To remove the panel, just unlock, tilt backwards, and lift. Quite an easy way to make a removable panel for the occasional access to the cabinet insides. On my Magneto cab I used bolts and insert nuts to keep the removable back panels in place, but that was too annoying whenever you needed access.

The top panel also had to come off, as I completely forgot to create a 0.2" channel for the marque to sit in. Besides that I also added a small piece of wood for the power button on top.

And finally I cut some aluminium mesh to size for both the top and bottom ventilation holes. The mesh is spray painted black on one side.

[edekoning]

Things Left to do are (somewhat in order):

• Cut the Control panel top to size. Only needs a single angled cut at the back
• Attach Control panel top to the control panel box using a piano hinge. and add magnets to hold it in place
• Order side artwork, CPO and marquee
• Start painting the everything satin black
• Cut out holes for the two coin doors, but I will only do that once I have received the actual coin doors
• Buy and attach an aluminium strip to the speaker panel, to hold the marquee in place and spray paint it black
• Buy a clear sheet of plexi to cover the bezel
• Determine how to mount the joysticks
• Cut all needed holes in the control panel
• Apply all artwork
• Install all parts
• Setup software
• Enjoy a job well done and play some games

[edekoning]

Things Left to do are (somewhat in order):

• Cut the Control panel top to size. Only needs a single angled cut at the back
• Attach Control panel top to the control panel box using a piano hinge. and add magnets to hold it in place
• Order side artwork, CPO and marquee
• Start painting the everything satin black
• Cut out holes for the two coin doors, but I will only do that once I have received the actual coin doors
• Buy and attach an aluminium strip to the speaker panel, to hold the marquee in place and spray paint it black
• Buy a clear sheet of plexi to cover the bezel
• Determine how to mount the joysticks
• Cut all needed holes in the control panel
• Apply all artwork
• Install all parts
• Setup software
• Enjoy a job well done and play some games

[edekoning]

Finally cut the control panel to size with an 48 degree angled cut. As you can see it still needs some sanding, to improve the fit. That will have to wait until I add some t-molding the cabinet, as the control panel will rest on that.

I also started painting, first layer of primer is done. I dropped the paint bucket on my shoes, which caused an absolute mess, and means I need to buy additional primer for the control panel The primer I got (Sigma S2U) is pretty good: easy to work with and great coverage. So I am hopeful to not have to prime it again after sanding.

I also ordered side art, cpo and marquee from https://www.szabosarcades.com/ --> production time 5-7 weeks, shipping time 3+ weeks  My coin doors have also still to turn up after 7 weeks...

[edekoning]

I am officially in painting hell

The first layer of paint after priming went on nice and smooth, and looks terrific.
I applied a second layer of paint for all the visible parts: side panels, front panel, speaker panel, and a few other areas.
The results were horrible though, as it seemed my roller disintegrated, leaving small fabric parts all over the place.
I did not notice this during the painting, as when painting black on black its really hard to see what you are actually doing.

So more sanding and using a non-fabric roller for another layer of paint, and again the results were not great.
Dust specks everywhere! How the F@#$ did that happen, as I waited a week between sanding and painting, and used a damp cloth to wipe the cab and surrounding area multiple times, during that time.
Then I realized, I left the stick to stir the paint on the ground next to the cab when sanding, and never cleaned it afterwards. So that is most likely the source of contamination of my paint.

The front panel and speaker panel are luckily not that bad actually. It's only noticeable when you either feel the wood, or a bright light reflects off the surface. The side panels are worse and I fear for when I need to apply side art.
So I was wondering, can I just lightly wet sand the side panels with say 1000+ grit, and then apply the side art. Or does the side art stick better when I just repaint it after sanding?

[DaOld Man]

I like your build.
Painting is a real PITA for me.
Dust, insects, roller patterns, you name it, i have seen it.
My last project I tried spray painting (using the ole rattle cans), it looked better than the rolled on paint, but I went through a bunch of cans of paint.
I am not now nor will ever be a good painter. LOL
I bought a cheap airless paint sprayer from harbor freight. That was 30 bucks wasted. It spit drops everywhere.
I dont think I have enough patience to do the job right.

[edekoning]

I am thinking of doing a small project after this just to try out laminating. As that would remove 95% of the painting process. Then again, that might have its own issues. Only one way to find out I guess.

[DaOld Man]

I used laminate on my jukeboxes, and I was very pleased with it.
Although it can be expensive, it looks real good, and no painting at all (on my projects anyway).

[javeryh]

I am officially in painting hell

Did you seal the plywood with something like Kilz?  It looks from the picture that the grain is soaking up the paint which means you didn't seal it.  Two coats of Kilz with sanding in between should leave you with a very nice surface and the grain barely visible (or not visible at all).  You can apply art directly to the primed surface or finish it with whatever top coat you want and it will come out looking nice.  It does take patience though.  I use a 3/8" nap roller with a high quality paint and sand in between each coat with 220 grit.  Wipe down the surface, make sure you are not painting in a dusty area or outside where insects and pollen can land on the surface, etc.  It takes practice but if you stick with it you will get great results.

[Mike A]

It looks like a Williams cab. You can see the woodgrain underneath the paint.

[edekoning]

No I did not seal the wood, just used one layer of primer followed by 2-4 layers of semi gloss oil based paint. Did not realize sealing wood was a thing, as I've also never done that on previous projects. Anyway the results are now acceptable.

So after 4 months of waiting  I finally got the coindoors delivered. As I already painted everything, I used tape to out line what needed to be cut. The tape also protects the paint from scratching with the jigsaw.

[edekoning]

Still waiting on artwork, though it is supposedly in transit. Probably gonna take a few month before it arrives ... Not sure what is happening with international shipments from the US, but its painfully slow. Also lots of webshops just refuse to ship internally anymore.

Anyway, to pass the time I started mounting and wiring up as much as I could. I cut up an aluminium L-profile, and superglued that to the PSU, AMP. For the PC, I took some leftover plexi, and mounted the motherboard to it using standoffs. Then I just screwed that plexi plate to the side of the cab. All power cables are routed to the let side of the cab, all the PC/audio cables to the right. Wired up the coin door lights to the PSU, but the coin switches will have to wait until I start wiring up the control panel. I reused these two Philips led lamps that can be tilted for the marquee area. Added aluminium grills to all the ventilation holes, mounted the speakers, and added a fancy power button at top. Note that the AMP is mounted in such a way that I can easily access its controls via the right coin door.

[edekoning]

I also mounted the tv screen bezel, added the hidden start buttons beneath the control panel, and added black t-molding to the control panel box and to the front of the top panel. Not much left to do at this point, besides waiting for the artwork to arrive, at which point I still need to:

• Drill and route the control panel top, to be able to mount the buttons and joysticks.
• Apply control panel overlay and yellow t-molding.
• Apply side art and yellow t-molding.
• Install marque and aluminium retainer.
• Wire up the controls

[edekoning]

Worked on the software setup.

I chose around 20 beat'em-ups. There will be two game lists. One with all the english versions (parent roms), and one with all the 'best' versions (clones), which typically ends up being the japanese version.

AttractMode will be used as frontend: http://attractmode.org/
With a slightly modified version of the Arcadeflow theme to get a cleaner less cluttered look: http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=2068.0
The theme itself is just a smooth scrolling grid of screenshots with wheel images overlayed. Once selected the screenshot morphs into a video snap.

Still need to go through most games to check dipswitches, service menu's, and input mappings. To make sure stereo sound is enabled (which is not the default on all games!), coin doors are setup properly, max player counts are enabled, etc.

[meyer980]

ooo, I like that AttractMode theme. Still a tad cluttered for my taste, so curious to see how your final version comes out. Looking good!

[SNAAKE]

amazing cabinet. dual coin door and everything just like the og xmen cab

[Sh0t0K4n]

Looking Good.
The build seems to go flawlessly. There's some experience in building cabinets here
Looking forward to the finished product 

[javeryh]

The theme itself is just a smooth scrolling grid of screenshots with wheel images overlayed. Once selected the screenshot morphs into a video snap.

Sick.  This is a really original look. 

[edekoning]

Thanks guys!

Its been a while since my last update, but I am pretty much done. Anyway the next thing I did was apply the artwork.

I ordered a full set from szabosarcades.com, as they appeared to be the only shop that sells correct side-art, and not some copy/paste variant based on the 6 player machine.

Marquee was perfect. Put the cab on its back, placed the marque in place, and marked where the marque retainer needed to go. This retainer is just a piece of aluminium that I had bent and then spray painted black. I did not have any nice looking black screws, so used the best looking non-black screws I had lying around. Will look for some nice black screws further down the line when shops are open again like normal (smurfin covid lockdown).

Applying side art to a cab really brings it to live. No more boring uni-color cab I did decide to sand the side panels one last time with 2000 grit, to make it super smooth, before applying the side-art. Once done, there is still a slight hint of woodgrain visible when light the side-art at an angle, but I actually think that looks really nice. I then applied the yellow t-molding. Man that sure looks nice alongside the the black wood and blue background of the side-art!

Btw the packaging was the best I have experienced so far. Overall just very good quality, but I guess that is what you pay for. That and import taxes, even on shipping costs ...

[Gilrock]

Hey you're still around.  Looks great!  Thanks for the NES Bartop as well not sure if you saw I used your design to make one with a wider monitor.

[edekoning]

The control panel at this time still had no holes for the buttons and joysticks. As I could not find exact measurements online on where these needed to go. Only found the 2P Simpsons control panel details.
So the idea was to order the control panel overlay with precut holes. However, due to a misunderstanding from both sides, I received a CPO that had no holes and was 1mm too narrow.
I felt that 1mm was not worth it to just discard an otherwise perfectly fine CPO. That left the problem of where to drill the button holes.
Fortunately, Joe Szabo agreed to sent me the exact CPO outline, so I could drill the final holes

I am using Ultimarc GoldLeaf pushbuttons, and Seimitsu LS-58-01 joysticks with slightly stiffer LS-56 springs. These joysticks need to be mounted 7.5mm below the top of the control panel to get the proper stick height. I ordered them with S-plates, to get an additional 5mm of mounting depth. I thought that would be enough to use insert nuts. Alas, the s-plate is bend such, that there is just no clearance, as the screw hole is too close to the bend. Annoyed with this, I set it aside and just started on routing out space for the joysticks. Its really precise work, so I created a template for the outer whole size, then cut some wood strips to fill up this outer whole, to get to the inner hole size. The I spent 4 hours router copying all those shapes in multiple passes. as it was winter at the time I had to do this inside ... what a mess, thank god I am not using MDF ... Once done, all the corners were rounded due to the router bits being cylindrical, duh, so I used a chisel to square up the inner corners. Then I tried fitting the s-plates, but none fit. So a couple off hours of sanding later, they all fit really tightly. As in you need to press them in really hard, and then you need a screw driver to get them out again. Because of that and due to not using MDF, I will just screw them in place.

[edekoning]

Then I applied the control panel overlay, applied yellow t-molding, and mounted it on the control panel box via a piano hinge.

Next it was time to start adding and wiring up the controls. I decided to put the keyboard encoder on the base of the control panel box. Started wiring up the coindoors and hidden start buttons first. For the coindoors I decided using two 4-pin molex connectors, so I can easily disconnect them and remove the entire control panel box from the cabinet.

[edekoning]

Time to wire up the controls 

I am using the following color coding for all the wires:
white = coin
green = start
ground = black
blue button = blue
red button = red
yellow button = yellow

The joysticks come with their own rainbow colored wiring harness ... I also applied this tape, used to create water tight connections, to the joystick shafts to make sure the bal-tops remain in place, and don't accidentally unscrew during intense gameplay. Added two 6KG magnets to hold down the control firmly in place.

[edekoning]

Spend many hours setting up the 25 games beat-em-ups in mame and AttractMode correctly. Things like, for 2 player games the middle two joysticks are used, setting up all the player counts, and coindoors correctly in all the service menus. This is also one on the reasons why a Cab with a full games list will never work. Sure you have a ton off games, but most of them are not configured correctly. I know, I have been there with my first Magneto cab. Live and learn I guess.

I actually have 2 games lists with the same games: one for guests with all English/World/Europe roms, and one for me and my gaming buddies with all the Japanese roms which are typically considered the better games, balance wise. For some reason many people can't handle Japanese, even if its just a BS intro you can skip 

Started playing it, and WTH is this lag, un-playable ... started updating bios/drivers, tried using regular usb keyboards/controllers ... nothing helped ... then it hit me. Months ago I setup the TV to enable low latency mode, game mode, etc, for a specific HDMI port. But I removed the screen when applying the side art. Afterwards I reinstalled all the hardware but connected the wrong HDMI port Oh well it all works now

Sorry for all these crappy phone pics btw. Maybe I can create some proper pictures in the near future.

[edekoning]

Hey you're still around.  Looks great!  Thanks for the NES Bartop as well not sure if you saw I used your design to make one with a wider monitor.

Thanks!

No I missed your build, do you have a link?

[vertexguy]

Dang dude!  This came out really nice!  Looks like an authentic reproduction to me.  Super clean wiring on the CP too!   That should be a great 4 player cab.
 

[Gilrock]

Hey you're still around.  Looks great!  Thanks for the NES Bartop as well not sure if you saw I used your design to make one with a wider monitor.

Thanks!

No I missed your build, do you have a link?

Here ya go....I actually built 2 identical copies at the same time....one went to my personal trainer who had talked about wanting some type of game machine and heard me talking about my stuff:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,164745.0.html

P.S.  I started out with a Raspberry Pi in there and now I've swapped in a Mister FPGA and having a blast with that.

[javeryh]

Good god this thing is perfect.  Damn.  Great job.

[bobbyb13]

This is a REALLY nice looking machine.

Colors look great together.

[edekoning]

I used a master/slave powerstrip, so when the computer shutsdown everything else loses power. Likewise when the computer starts up, power is restored again to the marquee lights, screen, and audio amplifier. However, each time the speakers will emit a very load 'bang'. Besides being annoying I have no idea if that could damage the speakers or amp. Does anyone know what might cause this? For now I just switch off/on the amp manually as its reachable via one the of the coin doors.

[vertexguy]

My computer audio speakers do the same thing and I hadn't bothered to figure out why since I rarely turn them off.  As far as I can tell it's an energy surge that makes them pop.  Here's how one person explained it and gives hints to resolve.

When you switch off the power to your amplifier, its power supply will collapse asymmetrically which will cause the amplifier’s output to be at an indeterminate state when it should remain at zero DC.

This results in the switch On or Off thump.

Most amplifiers will contain an output relay to negate this problem - the relay is energized or de-energized only when the amplifier’s output is stable.

Here's a car audio post that looks like it covers both off and on pop issues with ways to mitigate.  Given a lot of this hobby seems to either use PC speakers or car audio amps and speakers i would hope this solves it.  Very interested to hear if this works for you

https://caraudioadvice.com/how-to-fix-amp-speaker-turn-on-turn-off-pop/

[edekoning]

Wow, thanks a lot for the link. Seems I have some testing to do, in order to find out the actual issue.

[BigCaah]

Holy cow, absolutely beautiful 

[ZTylerDurden717]

I always come back to look at builds with the rotated displays to get more 4:3 real estate.  Nice job!

I like everything about this cab at the same time I'm wondering if the depth of the cab was primarily to fit the display.  It's actually pretty loyal to the original in terms of how deep CRT cabs were...so was the depth used to mimic the original or to fit the slanted angle of the LCD?