Hi Scott,
Thank you for your response, I apologize for the delay as I didn't receive any notifications of replies.
1) Shifted functions and/or a wireless keyboard that I have tied in.
2) Thanks for the link/info. This is excellent and I basically did this without seeing this, but it reinforces what I had already determined.
3) Poorly. I used short screws, and probably should've done it the proper way like everyone on here. Photos (and video) are under
my active projects page.
Thanks for the info. about the joysticks (not trying to start a religious war), I based it off of multiple photos that I saw, as well as stock deck in Arcade1Up cabinet.
I bought the Ultimarc GoldLeaf RGB Illuminated Pushbuttons. The only problem that I'm having now is needing to track down what kind of LEDs are inside of these for replacing on these brand new (not even a week old!) buttons, since I need to replace a few of the LEDs (mistakes were made).
I'm using the Ultimarc Ultimate and am maxed out on everything (I'll add more photos) and having to use a LED splitter to merge the Start and Coin buttons for each of the 4 players (e.g. for TMNT, player 1 start & coin would be blue, player 2 start & coin would be yellow, player 3 start & coin would be purple, player 4 start & coin would be red).
Further down the road, I'm going to remove the use of the coin buttons and dedicate them to something else (e.g. dedicated buttons that you mentioned in your question #1 since I've 3-D printed a replacement mount with "quarter insert" buttons below. Since I'm out of available interrupts on the Ultimarc, I'm going to put together a
H.I.D. microcontroller (basically the same functionality that the Ultimarc does) that also serves as a "state machine" microcontroller (like what's described in
this article) for a power button that toggles the state of the machine.