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Control Panel Database: Post a picture of your Control Panel!
mike.ferreira.37201:
Here is my CP that just finally finished after getting parts years ago. Anyway it's not my best work but the kids are loving it!!
Mike
rovingmind:
After many odd years of never getting around to building anything, i finally put together a control panel.
The daughter (8) is overjoyed.
IAmDotorg:
Figured I'd toss mine up on here. There's three of them because its for a 4-player cocktail cabinet. MAME just orients the games and controls based on if the game is horizontal, vertical or uses the trackball/spinner. Everything I've tried so far plays very well on it, including some 4-player games like Gauntlet. (I rotate the joystick settings so the player's movements match the stick for the two players at the end of the table.)
Everything is RGB lit, and the spinner is a push/pull so I can play games like Tron that need a spinner and a trigger. (You just push the spinner instead of pulling the trigger to shoot.)
Overlays are the polycarbonate prints from Game-On-Graphix. Yes, there's a blue lightening bolt on it... but there's also x-ray images of a galaxy and a nebula care of the Spitzer space telescope, so its not *that* blue lightening. :D
lebronfaling:
How do people get their wiring so neat and tidy and organised? Every time I try it just winds up looking like the creature from the black lagoon. It's terribly distressing.
IAmDotorg:
--- Quote from: lebronfaling on December 07, 2014, 09:21:29 am ---How do people get their wiring so neat and tidy and organised? Every time I try it just winds up looking like the creature from the black lagoon. It's terribly distressing.
--- End quote ---
That's why you don't build your cab out of Plexiglass. No one will know!
Seriously, though -- the back side of mine are like an explosion in a wire factory. 37 buttons, RGB LEDs on each across the whole unit. That's 222 wires running to two controllers, plus four USB joysticks, a USB trackball and USB spinner, each with their own set of wires. There's no sane way to keep it all neat. I don't have any photos of the back of mine, but I basically cleaned things up by zip-tying things into smaller bundles and then zip-tying them together into bigger bundles. But its a giant mess, but no one would ever know looking at the cab, so who cares? With buttons only, you can buy a bunch of bulk wire, crimp connectors and heat shrink tubing, but its a lot of work that probably isn't worth it if you're not neurotic about wire neatness. (I have friends who would break into my house in the middle of the night and slowly rewire my whole cab if they knew what it looked like inside!)
Edit: I should add, having done LOTS of wiring over the years -- I'd rather have a less neat wiring job that had things with good color coding and labels, that something neat where every wire is the same color and nothing labeled. Nothing against some of the "neat" wiring in this very long thread, but when every wire is the same color, unlabeled and bundled together you have to end up cutting the bundles out if anything goes wrong anyway. As messy as mine is, every single bundle, every connector, every USB cord are all either tagged with labels from a label maker, or in some cases heat shrink tubing with printed labels. DYMO makes heat shrink tubing for their "professional" grade labelers. I used them a LOT building a couple cars, and used them on all the USB cables, and longer jumper bundles. (I have two ~50 wire bundles that get the LED wiring from the small CPs to the LED controller, which are zip-tied, covered with mesh wire loam, with labeled heat-strink on each end, for example.)