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Rooter's Arcade - My first cab
rooter:
Once I finish up my control panel artwork, I will be able to wire up my control panel. I went ahead and bought a control panel top from Knievel. I feel kind of lame doing that, but I did it for a few reasons. First, I won't have access to a wood shop for a few months and I couldn't wait to get started. Second, he's got crazy skills. I'm not that great with woodworking projects and I might be able to tolerate a flaw on the body of the case, but not on the controls themselves. Also, I never cut plexiglas before and I liked the fact that it was included in the price.
Anyway, here is my first rough draft of the control panel artwork. I would like some critiques and/or advice.
The center of the panel is a translucent blue trackball with LEDs behind it. It is supposed to look like the light is affecting the pieces of the control panel.
I'm not sure how well the blue is going to turn out. It looks horrible on my work's color laser printer, but that is a piece of junk. I'm sure my local print shop can do a better job than my work. I really want to know if it is worth sending it out to MAME Marques or somewhere similar.
Again, this is rough, I plan on adding glows/sparkles/etc in Photoshop and maybe a star field background or something else. I would love to hear anyone's ideas.
Thanks!
rooter:
The control panel is 99%finished and working. This is probably a bad thing as I can play games now. It's really going to deter me from finishing everything up. I didn't get a spinner yet. I'm thinking about asking for one for x-mas.
Major progress has been made on the cabinet as well.
bfauska:
I must have missed your post originally. That's pretty cool CP art, and the assembled CP looks great. The cab seems to be shaping up well too. Looks like it should be a nice project. Do you have any ideas for the marquee yet? Are you doing side-art? Using Knievel for the CP sets the bar high for the rest of the project, now you have to do a good job.
Barry Barcrest:
I love that control panel. :cheers:
rooter:
Thanks for the kind words! :)
I'm going with a similar color scheme and style for everything else. I know it's pretty plain, but there is going to be artwork pretty much everywhere and I didn't want to detract from the actual games. The colors also remind me of my local arcade growing up. That place was so dark, I don't think they used any lights other than the games themselves.
The marquee is just going to say "Rooter's Arcade" with artwork similar to the lines around player one's controllers being the first "R". I'll probably hide a few things in the background and jazz that part up a bit. I'm also going to make a custom Mala layout with the theme as well as a Future Pinball table that matches. Eventually I'm going to theme my website the same way, but I'm not going to bother with that until I put some stools in front of a working cab and waste a few hundred hours of my life away. I'm not sure about the side art yet. If I do make some, I will probably want to use a vinyl sticker like the one on the Flyercade: