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| panterafreak:
Hi all, I am trying to design a control panel for a sort of cabinet that I am making. The idea is that the whole cabinet is portable with the monitor being seperate and the computer integrated. I would like to be able to cart this to a friends house or lan party and hook it to their television. I was looking at including the following: 2 x 4/8 way joysticks (TStik Plus) switchable from above the CP 2 rows of 4 buttons for P1 and P2 (have seen 2x3 buttons with a thumb button, can someone explain that to me?, any games that need 2x4, ive seem em on other CPs?) 1 spinner (probably from oscarcontrols) 1 3" happs trackball optipac ipac4 (do I need the 4? will a 2 work?) P1 and P2 start and coin buttons, exit, settings for a total of 27 buttons. I thought I would also add 5 more buttons for pinball (2 for flippers, 2 for tilt, 1 for plunger) I will be running this on either a mini itx board or possibly a micro atx mobo I was thinking the control panel interface would be roughly 16x36 and am currently working on a layout in visio. I was thinking of having a spinnner over trackball config, can they share buttons? Games most likely to be played: mortal kombat series street fighter series marvel vs capcom arkanoid (spinner) missle command and centipede (trackball) Anyone have any comments? |
| Hoagie_one:
I bought a pair of folding table legs to do just this same kinda project....never finished it. |
| AlanS17:
Are you talking about a cabinet where the control panel disconnects entirely or are you talking about just a stand-alone control panel that can plug into any random tv? If you use a small motherboard with no expansion cards, there's no reason why you can't build everything into a control panel that will just detach from the rest of the cabinet. I'm not exactly sure how beefy a mini-itx board would be, but I think it would be your best bet. It's got built-in tv output and it's small. It's only a matter of power, but there are some faster ones coming out lately. I know my P3 @ 866MHz handles CPS2 games like a champ, but I don't know how the Via chips stack up against Intels for raw processing power. Still, I would think that a 1GHz mini-itx board would suit your needs. Of course, don't kill me if I'm wrong since I haven't tested it for myself yet. You'd have to double up on coin buttons, though - one set tied to the coin door and one directly on the panel for when it's removed. |
| markrvp:
Based on the games you mention as most likely to be played, I would suggest Happ Supers as joysticks instead of T-sticks. Then I would add a dedicated MsPacman/Galaga reunion stick for dedicated 4-way play. The T-Stick pluses take a little getting used to and for a traveling party box for fighters, I think the Happ Supers would probably be a better fit. This is all subjective and only my opinion. |
| panterafreak:
No cabinet, think of it as a stand alone control panel that happens to have the computer with it and will plug into the tv via Svideo or red/yellow/white just like a playstation. Here is a real quick drawing of what I was thinking of for the control panel. I did two rows of 3 buttons with a thumb button, can someone please explain this to me, I see this as the most common layout, is the thumb button used with NeoGeo games or is there a different reason for having it where it is? http://www.vulgardisplayofpower.com/files/cp_take2.gif Sorry for the size, quick and dirty there but it's to scale. The 4way joysticks would actually be top fire joysticks for games like smash tv. There seems to be a lot of wasted space in there.... Thanks markrvp that's probably a better idea, I was only really interested in the 4 way for pacman for the wife and I was only interested in those particular sticks as they can be changed to 4 or 8 without tools or opening the box up. |
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