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Party-Box...Countertop cab w/ laptop & flat screen
Crafty:
Joystick in my left hand (keep your thoughts clean), leaving my right hand free for trackball/button action
Ninten-doh:
Joystick on the left and trackball on the right.
johnperkins21:
--- Quote from: theCoder on June 07, 2006, 10:15:33 am ---I think (??) it is better to be consistant with which hand you use for guidance (joystick & trackball) and which hand you use for buttons.
I'm right handed but prefer to use a trackball with my left hand. Do more people use their right hand for trackballing or their left? Comments?
--- End quote ---
The way I look at it is which is going to be more complex? Most trackball games only use one or two buttons and rely much more on the trackball dexterity. So for this, I will use my right hand. The same goes for older games that use a joystick and one or two buttons. When you start getting into fighters and things of that nature, differentiating the multitude of buttons requires more dexterity and I will use my left hand for the joystick and right hand for the buttons.
Does that make sense? It's kind of like playing a guitar. A right handed guitar has you strumming and picking with the right hand and holding notes with the left. There are more times where precise control is needed and more work is done with the right hand in this situation.
theCoder:
Thanks for the input. I think I'll go with buddabing's recommendation (as backed up by Crafty, Nineten-doh, and johnperkins21). I've played paperdoll with Visio, now it's off to Photoshop. Another image to be posted soon.
Tapping into the volume pot
The amp I'm using has a very small, thin volume adjustment pot soldered on the PCB. I considered mounting the board so that the knob stuck though the case, but mounting was going to be a big hassle. I also did not like the wimpy feel of the thin plastic dial.
Rather than unsolder the thing out, I decided to just bypass the existing one, soldering in my own. The trickiest part was determining where to solder. There were 5 leads directly behind the pot. Of these, there were two distinct pairs. One pair coming from what appeared to be a high(er) voltage cable plug (colored red in the picture), and the other pair going off to a few resistors (colored blue). I never did determine what the other lead was. I picked up a "audio" variable resistor (0-100 k ohm) from Radio Shack. It is made specifically for stereo applications and has two sets of contacts, one for each channel. I soldered one set of leads in and tested it out. I could tell that it was doing something, but I couldn't get the volume completely off. Thinking about what I'd done, I had the on-board resistor in parallel with mine.
I decided to cut the on-board one out of the circuit. I had to hack & slice the leads on the PCB with a pocket knife to the point where you could barely recognize it. The leads cut were those I've colored yellow in the picture. Those leads must have been very thick or something. It works like a champ. Now I can mount the amp anywhere I want (probably on the back wall) and can bring the pot to one of the back lower I/O panels designed for this purpose.
If you are going to be doing this kind of work, the magnifying glass with roach clips soldering tool from Radio Shack makes it much easier to handle and see.
theCoder:
I forgot to include this shot showing the pot. This was before I cut the "yellow" lines. The finished version has the two wires on the right soldered to the "blue" spots.
While I had the soldering iron out, I soldered in the CPU on/off wires. These will be routed to a pushbutton in one of the two lower I/O ports. I had problems getting the solder to take. I think I should have gone with smaller gauge wire. To keep things in tact, I epoxied the wires to the side of the CPU.
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