Verticade: bartop + vpin

Main > Project Announcements

<< < (2/3) > >>

basbase:
I placed the fixed part of the back panel. And immediately screwed up. What is wrong with this picture?

The monitor was not upright and can now no longer be turned in the right position. Luckily it is easily fixed because it is mounted with bolts.

Most of the back panel will be a hatch. I use a piece of wood to provide some structure to attach a piano hinge with screws.

I pre drilled to prevent splitting the wood.

The control panel was not flush with the sides.

So I attacked with a file:

Time to drill holes for the controls. The control panel will have a single 8 way stick and 2 buttons. This should be enough for most classic arcade games and shmups. I have saved an identical piece of wood in case I ever want to swap it out with a control panel with a different button configuration.
I first drilled pilot holes in the places that felt natural to position my hands at.

I love using the router.

Now onto the actual holes.

For the pinball buttons I made holes for left flipper, left nudge, start, plunger, right nudge and right flipper. For the up nudge I use a autohotkey script to combine to detect when left and right nudge are pressed simultaneously and send a different key in that case. In hindsight, maybe I should have included an additional button on the right to allow magnasave (especially for Timeshock), but I'm now considering swapping right nudge with magnasave if it is supported.
The location of the buttons took quite some fiddling around. I had to find a balance between having a natural feeling distance from the lockbar and leaving space for the monitor bezel to move between arcade and pinball mode.

A monitor, computer and power supply in an enclosed case can get quite warm, so I had to think about cooling the thing. For air intake, I have left a gap between the corner between the back and the bottom. For the outtake, I planned to have a fan at the bottom and the top. This way there is always a fan at the high end, whether in arcade or in pinball orientation, so rising hot air can be exhausted. Both the bottom and back panel are spaced by 1 cm through the sides extending beyond them. This ensures that the fan that is at the bottom does not blow against a solid wall.

A fan guard should prevent chopped up kid fingers.

For the audio department I took apart a pair of pc speakers.

And drilled holes for them in the side panels.

For the brains of the machine I initially wanted to use a Raspberry Pi. But due to covid scarcity those became ridiculously expensive. I found a Lenovo mini pc for a third of the price a Pi would have cost at the time. This also allows me to run Windows and greatly increase the range of software it can run.
To mount the computer, I found the easiest way to be drilling holes in the top case and driving screws through them.

Installed computer, speakers and fans

basbase:
The corners have exposed wood due to the the cuts. To cover these up I use metal corner strips. These will also provide protection against wear and they even look like like pinball legs.

Now onto hooking up the buttons.
To keep the wires in place I screwed in a few velcro strips.

For the wires I repurposed an old data cable I had laying around.

These crimping tools make make the connections very clean and serviceable.

Controller board is hold in place using some screws.

Creating a hole for the power switch and receptacle.

I'm using a 3 socket power strip to power the devices on the inside.

Making sure everything is insulated.

To keep the control panel from opening up I use a latch and an angle bracket for it to hook on to. When I have the machine open from the rear side, I can just manage to reach it.

I've mounted speaker grills, unfortunately the chrome does not match that of the corner strips, but I'm not making a fuss about it because I want to keep costs down.

And this is the final look.

On it's back with screen still up.

And with the screen down for better viewing angle.

basbase:
The build was complete, but when actually playing it I was very disappointed with the performance of the mini pc. The arcade games could not run at an acceptable framerate with any shaders applied, so I could not get a nice crt effect. Pinball games were also pretty much unplayable due to lag. So I had to get an upgrade.

Getting a mini pc with better specs would cost a multitude of what the entire project had cost me so far. I found an alternative in an old HP Elitebook lapotop with a decent graphics chip. The only place where it could fit was on the back panel. I reinforced the plate with some pieces of wood that would also keep it straight. To prevent it from falling of I used velcro strips so that I could also take it to use it for LAN parties. The 240W power brick for this thing takes up almost the entire space that the mini pc occupied. After this upgrade I could run all the fancy shaders and the pinball games are running smoothly.

firedance:
What was the spec of the mini pc, which version of windows was it running ?

I used a dell thin client for my last bartop, windows 10 was way too sluggish so switched to windows 7, much better and plays almost all the vertical mame games ok via a coinops build :)

Malenko:
I love everything about this. Any plans for art/vinyl/paint?

Navigation

 Message Index

Go to full version