So anyways, back to the project at hand.
I deeply understand why people choose to gut existing generic cabs for their first efforts. I don't regret what I've undertaken although I wish it was done already.
Please excuse the detail below, but it's been a while since I bumped this thread and this is my way of convincing myself I'm making progress.
So it's been upstairs for a while with its panels detached. Kinda necessary to remove the panels or it won't fit through doorways. Since I only have one Keywiz (1.5) to share between both panels (and one Opti-Wiz on the TurboTwist and shared with the trackball on the other side) this means that I had to sort out a quick-release system or face rewiring every time I lugged the thing in- or outside. I remind you, dear reader, that I live in subtropical
Brisbane, Australia where The Done Thing is to sit with mates on your back deck, throwing back plenty of
Very,
Cold,
Beer. Not inviting Calvin the Cocktail Cab would be unthinkable.
My particular back deck, however, is still just that, a roofed deck - and Calvin will be exposed to the splash from the rare shower of rain, at least a little bit. I plan to get something like a motobike cover for it, but I'll need to drag it inside occasionally - during winter, leaving the house for extended periods, passing cyclones etc.
^ quick disconnects for control panels so the unit can be moved through standard doorways. | | So all that has led to a lot more soldering than seems to go on for all you lucky people who just have your buttons wired straight into your encoder.
I've been making these sorts of things with the second-cheapest soldering iron they had when I bought it many years ago, with the second-biggest tip I'm sure. Side 1 (with the trackball) has 22 switches plus ground, all going through that D25 plug you see in the photo. The matching female for that (not pictured) has three lengths of cat5 hanging out of it which will lead into the encoder.
Side 2 has far fewer switches to handle, but there is that matter of the trackball and spinner (Opti-Wiz, anyway) that need to communicate, so more plugs and sockets there too.
The ground from both sides is going through a DP switch so I can isolate one of the "player 1" controls depending on which side the players are sitting at.
There are also three admin buttons, identical on both sides, in the carcass itself (just above the control panels) that don't need to go through the plugs since they don't detach.
|
^ Power input bottom-left, monitor killswitch bottom right.
| | The first thing I did was actually get power inside the box. A kettle cord socket on the outside means I don't have to wrap the wire around the legs when transporting it, and is generally a bit neater. Inside that the wiring goes through a connector block and powers a powerstrip for the PSU, monitor and amplifier.
Luckily for me the motherboard I am using supports "always on" for "AC power loss restart status" in the BIOS. I have one switch on the outside of the cab that boots the PC, powers the monitor and turns on the sound.
The monitor cable from the powerstrip actually passes through a junction box with a switch behind it (bottom right of the picture). This SPST switch cuts the neutral wire, allowing me to turn the monitor off and on without needing to touch any buttons inside the case. Kinda important for forcing a degauss in this rotating monitor cabinet.
I should note here that the flash is VERY unkind to the cabinet in this photo - the big gougey shapes visible in the wood are not at all obvious IRL, and that side of the cab is intended to face the wall as well. The wood I started with had, after all, been boxing in concrete until last year The edges will be covered with aluminium angle strips too. |
^ On a temporary bench for... benchtesting, I suppose. | | I've dug an Athlon 2500+ and motherboard out of a box that I bought from some guy a few years ago and never actually tested when I got it. A bit of thermal paste, a quick repair job to the chipset heatsink that had come loose in transit and bounced around all over the motherboard for a thousand kilometres ( ), quick injection of some fast-moving electrons and hooray, it booted first time !
That photo shows a green motherboard attached to the side wall of the cabinet. That's a dead mobo I'm just using to locate the screwholes for the real mobo which is the red one. (Yes, I know one is μATX and not all the holes will match!) That's also not the actual monitor.
The motherboard will be fastened to the wall using the Bic Trick (slices of ballpoint pen used as insulated spacers and a normal pan-head screw through the guts).
The good news is that the software side of things should be fine. I've migrated MAME and Vpin over from my desktop machine and playtested a little. |
^ A little mounted panel for all the stuff you don't want to have to open to lid to reach. | | Some of the niceties I wanted for this cab were two headphone jacks, a couple of USB ports for mouse/kb as required and a volume knob for the speakers. To get my wish I had to create a metal mounting plate that could house the USB and headphone jacks (they don't seem to make them to fit 17mm form ply, for some reason). I jigsawed the wall of an old PC case to get a metal plate, then drilled, then filed the rectangular holes for the USB jacks, and drilled through for the headphones and volume potentiometer. Note for those who aren't up with these things, the old Oscar Controls site had a nice tute on adding a volume knob to a cab. (nb: link via Wayback machine since site is defunct and I don't know if/where it's mirrored?) |
^ Hand-made headphone splitter. Just parallel wiring, nothing to see here.
^ Little hack for connecting the front panel audio wiring to my headphone jacks. | | I wanted two headphone jacks so that two players could play happily until silly hours of the morning, and the music/fx from the games wouldn't wake up my wife or kids (assuming the kids weren't the ones playing). Instead they can get woken up by the microswitches and constant swearing.
I tore up some old "CDROM audio connector" cables which were just perfect to fit over standard jumper pins for the front panel audio connector. And luckily for me, they had just enough actual wire in the right spaces to fit the pins that I needed to cover.
The motherboard I'm using (Abit NF7-S) has this dorky front panel audio header that kills the rear output if you try to use it. Not just when the headphones are attached (which would be fine) - but if you want to use the normal, back-o-the-mobo audio output at all (which I do, for my speakers), you have to 'close' the front panel by leaving a couple of jumpers across that pinout, or plugging in headphones. I didn't want to have to leave 'phones, or some dummy plug, connected all the time in those sockets so I wired it all up using an additional CDROM cable. The upshot is that I am telling the rear connector that it's on, while using the headphones through the "front panel". Actually muting the speakers while headphones are in use is managed by turning the volume knob right down. Hooray!
That paragraph may make no sense to anyone other than Abit NF7-S owners, but please take away from it that if you choose to use surplus hardware, be prepared for it to be not quite up to the task in bizarre little ways you don't discover until you're up to your neck in it.
Squeezing two back-to-back like this meant I had to gnaw off part of the plastic housing intended to guide the plug into the right pins. Long-nosed pliers worked a treat and they were soon squeezed together. |
Yesterday I made up a Things to Do list, and it has about forty-five things on it. Only a couple are going to be tricky; I changed my mind on the t-molding recently, and bought some chrome. The bad news is that the slot is already cut for the red stuff, and it's a thicker core (I needed the 1/16" for the chrome). So I have to either painstakingly glue and clamp this chrome stuff and hope it doesn't pop out, or fill / purchase-slot-cutter-again / re-cut / re-paint-since-I-will-scratch-the-bejebus-out-of-it. Or just put my tail between my legs and settle for the red molding after all.