Lots of little tasks and projects going on right now before I can start my bartop cabinet build but I do have most of my parts ready. Let's see what's on the table shall we:
Well earlier this year I got bit with the Street Fighter IV bug and hoping it would live up to my expectations and as Borat would say... NOT! The game looks very impressive but doesn't do a thing for me compared to a good old game of SFII on MAME. As you know Microsoft is a pain in the you know what when it comes to third party periphals and my choices at the time was to either live with playing on the crappy d-pad, get gouged by a scalper for a Madcatz SE or TE fight stick or do a controller hack. Unfortunately I don't have the tools (ie. solder iron) or skills to do a pad hack because the points to solder on are so small and precise. I found a local place that builds custom controllers using "genuine" HAPP parts for 360 for around $200. I don't mind the $ amount and besides I could have spent the same to get a Matcatz TE which uses Sanwa parts. I still don't understand what the hype is about Japanese parts from all these fanboys who grew up playing HAPP here in North America. Anyways, this stick has always bothered me because it didn't quite feel the same as the arcade because when I play street fighter I can never do the roundhouse sweep and fireball combo with Ken or Ryu consistently. I know it is not me because I had this stick hooked up on my PC playing SFII via MAME and when I would hook up my old X-arcade I can do the combo just fine. How could this be?? x-arcade stick > "genuine" HAPP
Anyways, my itch to play SFIV died pretty fast and I put the this stick on the back burner till a few weeks ago when I downloaded SF2HD remix from the Xbox Live market place. I opened up this stick despite it voiding my warranty and found out it was not a genuine HAPP Stick in there but some sort of knock off. From the top it looks like it but from the bottom it is far from it. I contacted the person I bought the stick from and he swore it is genuine HAPP because that is what his supplier told him. A genuine HAPP competition is like < $10 so how much cheaper can this knock off be? Also when I opened the stick I noticed they didn't use quick disconnects but soldered all the wires to the parts and I asked about that and he said they did that so there is no lag and helps to "optimize" play
Crap on the left and genuine HAPP Competition on right
After I switched sticks problem solved, guess where the crap stick went.... that's right GARBAGE can. Task completed.
Next item on the table was I had to repair a HTPC I built for my brother in-law. He had kept this computer in a cabinet on his wall unit which had no air circulation and I warned him that it will either kill the computer or power supply. Luckily for him it was just a power supply and I had an extra one lying around to swap. Now the exact same fit but works. The cost of finding the exact one costs about as much as the case it's self, stupid micro-atx desktop cases.
Next was I had to just install and fill 4x1TB drives with media for a close friend of mine who is using his laptop as a HTPC. He comes over to my place all the time and loves how I have over 12TB of movies and tv series on my media server at my disposal at all times without even having to get up and switch discs. Now he is 1/3 of the way there because discs are so yesterday
Last project to finish before I can start planning my bartop arcade was a dual player arcade controller, which I plan on surprising my cousin for taking a week off to entertain my family back in September when we went down there for a vacation. When I was there he was floored when he saw emulators played on my netbook. I always carry my netbook everywhere I go along with a Sega Saturn USB controller which I left behind for him when I loaded up all my emulators on his desktop computer. His girlfriend was getting all crazy playing Ms. Pacman but couldn't for the life of her use the game pad and kept saying she needs a joystick to play
I picked up this x-arcade from a good friend of mine for $20 minus the x-arcade controller board but came with HAPP buttons and x-arcade sticks. I ordered a GP-Wiz from Randy T to install in this and figure USB would be great for my cousin since he could bring this from his house to condo when he has some friends over and hook it up to his HTPC which I built for him easily.
Fortunately, the place where the old x-arcade pcb is the pefect fit for the GP-Wiz
I started to do the wiring last night around 12:30am and got all the connection done on the PCB side. It was getting pretty late, 1:30am, so I decided to pack it in since I had to work the next day. I know if I started and ran into a problem I would probably stay up the entire night to figure it out cause that is what happened when I was wiring up my showcase project.
I will finish it up tonight, test it and then use a glue gun to secure all the connections since this will be shipped to Miami. Now a sneak peak at what I have so far for my MAME Bartop.