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My First Cab--a (portable) cocktail design

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caver01:
Ok, the question has come up: How does the latching work?
I am using this part which I picked up at Menards for a few dollars:


In my cab, I use six of them. The first two hold the screen, but since they are not accessible from the OUTSIDE, I rigged an ingenious lever mechanism using small sheet copper, some copper wire and a few screws:


It's hard to tell what you are looking at, but basically, the elbow latches are spring loaded, and where you wouldnormall push down with your thumb to retract the tooth/catch, I drilled a little hole. Through this hole is a bent piece of copper wire. That goes down through a hole in a piece of flat copper. The copper is like a teeter-totter, mounted on a screw in the middle. This serves to REVERSE the direction of the latch. The OTHER end of that teeter-totter is attached to another piece of copper sheet running vertically down to the bottom of the cabinet where it bends at 90 degrees and covers a hole in the plywood (on the bottom of my cab). The whole rig is duplicated on the opposite side with another teeter-totter mechanism attached to another elbow latch. This holds the screen on both sides. Anyway, both of these mechanisms are rigged to the same vertical piece that covers the hole in the bottom of the cab, and when you push UP on the vertical piece using a pen or pencil (through the hole in the plywood) you slide the vertical copper piece UP. That lifts the teeter-totters which pivot on their mounting screw and they each PULL DOWN on the thumb latches--popping the monitor cover open!

I know, it's confusing as hell, but I could not think of another way to release the latches that are inside FROM THE OUTSIDE. In retrospect, I probably should have just used a barrel lock!

In the image above, the screen latch is not latched even though it looks like it is holding something. Basically, the screen is up and out of the way, and the latch is just there mounted very close (flat against) the edge of the horizontal control panel. When the screen closes over all of this, the little angled catch spring-locks into the tooth.

Here's an image of the latch on one of the side panels as well as part of the screen latch's left side (image taken from the back right corner of the cab looking toward the front-left corner). You can see the angled catch down inside the side panel compartment. I this case the spring latch is mounted upside down under the panel face and the catch part is stationary insde the panel. The perspective is hard to see, but the upside down latch is pointed AWAY from the camera:

IG-88:
 :cheers: Very nice! Did you say that you made the back panel out of copper? Where the serial port is. How did that go?

caver01:

--- Quote from: IG-88 on February 12, 2009, 07:12:34 pm --- :cheers: Very nice! Did you say that you made the back panel out of copper? Where the serial port is. How did that go?

--- End quote ---

Yeah, the back panel is copper. I do a lot of antique restoration, stained glass and lamp building, so I have copper around! Actually, this was leftover from a bookend project I did for my wife on our 7th wedding anniversary (copper anniversary). The gauge was too thin for that project, but it was perfect for this. I guess I could have used galvanized sheet metal, but I like the look of copper a lot! On it's own, it may have been a little flimsy even for this project, but once I had the screws into the wood back panel and the screws holding the PSU, it got pretty rigid. One thing I did like about using copper is that it drills VERY easily and since I will be adding USB ports soon, it will be pretty easy to file little rectangles like I did for the serial and ethernet ports.

That serial port is really only going to get used to program my URC home theater remote (has nothing to do with the arcade stuff at all!).

EwJ:
You put a lot of work into those latches. :applaud:

I have a similar keyboard/mouse (BTC 9019URF) but it doesn't look as compact as the 9116 you have there - good find.

Have you tried out Gauntlet or other 4 player games yet?  How did they work out?
It seems player 3 and 4 would be at a bit of a disadvantage being 90 degrees to the screen, (of course any design other than full size would have compromises)  but was it fully playable?

I had an Apple clone many years ago - they were abundant back then; It was an AppleII+ clone IIRC. A couple of years ago, I tried out Applewin briefly - I'll have to give MESS a try.  :cheers:

caver01:
I played gauntlet TODAY actually, and sitting at the player 3 (left side vertical end). There's no disadvantage whatsoever. Here's why: You map the controls as if you are facing the screen from the horizontal end--up (toward the screen) is RIGHT, right is mapped to DOWN, and so on. In other words, the directions are totally intuitive. For gauntlet, since it's top-down, it makes more sense to move the stick in the direction you want your character to run than it does to be oriented to the screen properly. This works great!

I also thought about it and wondered if the side players would get disoriented--and then I thought of the remapping in this manner and the result is so intuitive during play that you would not even THINK to do it any other way.

I have yet to experiment with other 4-player games, but this option may still apply and will probably require some experimentation. I wonder what others have done. Honestly, I can't think of more 4-player games (although I did setup a 4-player favorites list automatically with my FE). I will have to go through the list and try some of them!

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