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A Mame machine in an antique buffet - USB probs solved (I think!)

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drventure:
Wow. Thanks Ond!

I was talking with mine last night. She's getting a tad annoyed that we haven't been able to actually play it in a while cause it's all in pieces again.

But I explained that, really, at this point, for me anyways, it's kind of becoming more an operational work of art than just a gaming console. And art takes patience  ;D

BTW, when's that radar dish of your's gonna get mounted. I can't wait to see that!

Ond:
Welcome,   :lol "operational work of art"  I'm going to use that term too. The radar dish is happening in about a week, I'm obsessing about (and working on) the CP it's mounted in place on new hinges but more work is needed.

drventure:
Ok. A little more work and more request for feedback  :)

I know several cabs that have including light up buttons. Ond's buttons, with the glowing rings are probably the slickest in my mind, but, as I stared at things this morning, I just could not come up with any way to do that particular trick that wouldn't look utterly out of place.

So then I started thinking about putting the lights "beside" the buttons. My first thought was to use some little gold findings that I originally used as insets in some of my buttons...



But that just looks too busy to me. Plus those findings raise up from the cp surface, which would make restamping very difficult (and if history has taught me anything, it's that I'll likely be restamping again before this is done  ;) )

But then I thought, why not just ditch the findings and just have a little hole beside the button.

Pull out the drill and the scrap sample I made to try out inlaying, and viola!

From an angle


From head on


When it's dark


another angle


The varying glossiness is me testing how future would look and hold up on that formica (It seems to work very nicely, so far anyway).

Those last two images, if you look, there's actually 4 holes there of varying dia.

The very smallest is toward the middle in the last image.

That's what I'm tending towards right now. To cap it, I "commandeered" some citrine beads from my wife's bead collection.

They're small, yellowish, and fit perfectly. I drill a very small hole through the front, then CAREFULLY drill a bigger hole through the back, big enough to jam the bead into and snug it up to the underside of the formica top.

In the end, the bead is clearish, but doesn't show up as a brightish yellow spot when the LED is off, as a yellow LED would if I just snugged the LED up right to the underside of the formica.

In fact, as you can see from the bottom photo the bead almost makes the hole completely disappear when the LED is off.

But yet it's VERY visible, even with the lights on, when the LED is on.

I +really+ like the idea of lighting up which buttons are active when a game is selected. That's the whole point of this.

I also like the notion that I can insert and wire up these LEDs and they'll stay in place, I won't have to mess with them If I ever do need to take the buttons out again. That's a big plus.

They're VERY unobtrusive when everything's off, which is cool, but with em on and yellow, that seems to go very well with the overall black and gold artwork theme.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on it

Anybody think of any other ideas? I'm open to all sorts of wackiness!

Ond:
I agree, my lit ring buttons wouldn't suit your cab IMO.  (ironically I may not use them myself ) It looks like the small bead solution you've come up with does suit well.  Unobtrusive when off but  nice effect when on.  You are only going with gold/yellow lighting yeah?  (no multi colors I hope  :)).  

Benevolance:
It's a 4 player cab, right? I think that having a light by each button could get too busy looking, but busy in the distracting way, not in the usual intricate and complicated awesome Victorian way. What about instead of having a light by each button, you just had a single spot that had the lights laid out in the same pattern as the buttons. Then, that single light display could be lit up to indicate which buttons were funtional for a game, but for all four players at once? Sort of like a HUD display. But, you know, all brassy and metal and awesome instead of just transparent.

Dammit. There are too many pages. I can't locate a picture of the whole buffet assembled to suggest a spot you might put it. :P

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