finding questions I never thought of.

[daywane]

I thought I had it all worked out in my head. boy was I wrong. I am building my first cabinet . ( I have picked up 3 empty arcade cabinets and dove in.
1st problem. I mounted my monitor upside down like the real arcade monitor was, (it reflects off a mirror) well... I mounted the darn thing upside down (top is bottum and vice versa) then I was thinking this mirror will send my mouse left when I want right and right when I want left. any way to fight this. do I toss the mirror?
question #2 once I have my PC in the cabinet and the doors all shut how do you turn on and of the darn thing?
off realy is not hard . start and shut down , but when I want it back on, I realy do not want to be messing around with the insides becouse my monitors yoke is hanging there ready to send me for a loop.
I think I need to go back to the drawing board and start over
last question for the day. My controll panel opening is 24 1/4 " long and should be 6" wide. I am trying to stick with metal. I have sheets of the right thickness and have the tools to make a blank CP. can anyone with the same measure ments or close to this tell me what thay did? I plan on 2 player 6 buttons each and a track ball i do have a coin door with mechs so the coin buttons are not on the CP . I can think of 5 other buttons I will need. payer 1 and 2 start, Esc, Tab, and pause. any other thing I am missing? I can go wider than 6" if I need to but I am not sure on how to make it look right

[Zipper]

Just 1 thing -
Use an i-pac keyboard encoder http://www.ultimarc.com because it has a 'shift-key' option which will allow you to assign dual purposes to buttons. This will keep your control panel uncluttered.

e.g. holding P1 start and pushing 'up' on the joypad will pause the game (i.e. send 'p').

Check it out - very useful.

[hyiu]

for your 2nd question... I think when you supply power to your computer... you still need to push a button for the computer to start..... is that right ??  if I didn't remember wrong (I think I read it from some other people's website...) someone just extend the switch and hook it up on top of the cab... (that should be fairly easy...) and I think I read somewhere that some motherboard will have a jumper (or dip switch??) so that when power supplies, it'll just boot, but not wait for the push button.... so, check on your motherboard menu and see if there's such kind of options..... (but I can't guarantee you on this....)

for the control panel.... (24 x 6) should be tight but playable for 2 player with 6 buttons....
(I'm planning 2 players, each have 8 buttons ( 2 x 4) and each will need at least 14 inch of space...)
(but I think you'll need to make it come out (like 24 x 10) to fit the trackball.... also... depends on your style.... when I play games like soccer... I tend to hit the trackball hard... so, I won't put it too close to any joystick or I'll hurt myself..... (you might want to keep that in mind....) one thing definitely worthwhile to do is to use cardboard to make a 1:1 scale model once you have a layout.... its fairly easy and you can actually "feel" how it goes.....

and for the extra buttons... I've seen people have a line of buttons on the top edge of the control panel.... but then, with the line of buttons on top and the trackball below, you might need to extend even more....

hope it helps....

[aramis]

some more options for PC power-up, power-off:

- mount a remote momentary-contact switch on your cab (like on the top corner or something) and wire it in parallel to the PC power switch. I did this, but rarely use it because I...

- set the BIOS to boot from a keyboard press (spacebar). So, when I want the cabinet powered up, I just press the "spacebar" button ( a default Mame key) on my control panel.

- You might also be able to set your BIOS to re-power-up on power loss. So, it will turn back on when the outlet strip gets switched back on, etc.

- You can use a front-end (like Raging Dragon, Emuwizard, etc) that has the built-in ability to shut down windows and power off your PC when the front-end is exited. So, you put the frontend .exe in your startup folder so the cabinet boots right to it, and then when you are done playing it all shuts back down nice and neat.

(I've got all the above suggestions working on my cabinet right now, so I can pick and choose!)