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Battle Chasers Upright - Frankenpanel started!

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Boz:
Update: 9/28/2006

Progress is being made on the control panel overlay which, in hindsight, should have started doing MONTHS before I cut my first piece of wood. I know I've harped on this before, but artwork and lack of knowledge of the applications you need to create it (Illustrator) is my biggest deficiency.

I added 3 of 4 characters that I'd like to have on the control panel though nothing is set in stone yet. As I move forward I'll be changing placement and scale for the characters to reflect a nice balance. The progress image below doesn't show that the characters will be placed "underneath" the other objects on the overlay.

Here's the thread in the Artwork forum where I'm taking suggestions from the peanut gallery
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=58543.0


See the medium-sized progress image (1024 x 491, 140Kb)
See the full-size progress image (4320 x 2070, 756Kb)

NightGod:
I'll tell you from personal experience with a huge-ass control panel-you'll need a metric fuckton of wire (figure twice what you think you'll need and you'll probably be getting close) and it will take more time than you think. Honestly, I think I have as much time sunk into the CP as the rest of the cabinet. If you are planning on a Thanksgiving launch, get started on it sooner rather than later-you'll be greatful for the extra time two months from now.

Boz:

--- Quote from: NightGod on September 30, 2006, 11:34:17 am ---I'll tell you from personal experience with a huge-ass control panel-you'll need a metric fuckton of wire (figure twice what you think you'll need and you'll probably be getting close) and it will take more time than you think. Honestly, I think I have as much time sunk into the CP as the rest of the cabinet. If you are planning on a Thanksgiving launch, get started on it sooner rather than later-you'll be greatful for the extra time two months from now.

--- End quote ---

Yeah... I was just thinking this. I wired my little test CP (the one in the first page of this thread) and it took quite a while for just simple stuff. There wasn't any wire managment involved either. I'm really intent on a turkey day launch so I may have to take a couple of days of work to do the cabinet stuff then do the CP wiring at night.

Boz:
Update: 10/1/2006

It's been a fairly productive weekend and that's what I was hoping for.

Control Panel Overlay
I managed to get the control panel design out of the way and it's ready for the printers now. I took it up to Kinko's and about the only draw back (other than the fact that it's "Kinkos") is that they only have Illustrator CS installed. I created my artwork in CS2. I'm not really sure what features of CS2 I've used that will not show up or look right in CS. In any event, I'm going to be looking around tomorrow for local printers that can print large format graphics using Illustrator CS2. I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to find someone who uses polypropylene, but I'll take any half-way decent vinyl that looks good when printed.

As for the design (that resulted in surprisingly few responses from this community when I posted in the Artwork forum), I tried to stay as simple as possible. The truth is I'm "soooo over" this thing that I just want to get it out the door to the printer. I may add text for the player positions and potentially, some kind of indication of the character's name, but, other than that, I'm considering it mostly done. Personally, I think it has a nice balance to it.



Monitor / Video
I didn't take any pictures while I was doing it, but I finally took the time to replace the chassis in my Billabs 27" monitor. With everything that *could have* gone wrong, it was probably best that I just do one thing at a time. The chassis replacement took a mere 30 minutes to do. There were maybe a half dozen wires and connectors that needed to come off the existing chassis and put back on the replacement chassis. Good thing I took pictures, because one of the connections could have been put on the wrong way. (Oddly, the pictures I *did* take didn't give me as much of a clear picture of where it was supposed to go as it should have.)

With the monitor chassis now replaced, and the Billabs 27" firing on all cylinders, it was time to plug in the Ultimarc Arcade VGA card and try installing the drivers again. Unfortunately, after about 3 hours of screwing around, I was *never* able to get the drivers installed. Turns out the problem was mostly with the old motherboard I was using for my Mame PC. I put the AVGA card in my primary workstation to see if it was something computer related and lo-and-behold my main workstation was able to get the drivers installed (forcefully, I might add). They didn't/don't work perfectly yet, so I've posted another support question in the "Monitor / Video" forum. I suspect it's a fairly easy solution for someone.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=58686.0

postalp123:

--- Quote from: In2ishun link=topic=55184.msg578726#msg578726
[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/in2ishun/258141136/ ---[/url]

--- End quote ---

I think your panel design looks amazing, but I'm stumped as to why you didn't use Garrison instead of that evil monk guy, Garrison wears a fair amount of Blue as well so it shouldn't mess with your color scheme.

[FAULTY IMAGES DELETED]

Either way you go, I am impressed thusfar, but GArrison is the $#!t.

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