Dreamcast virtua tennis cab.

[mo1e]

Hello all i have decided to base my cab design on probably my most favourite dreamcast arcade game. Virtua tennis. Im new to all this design stuff and i have used sketchup (for the first ever time). This is a rough idea on what i want my cab to look like. Although im not sure on the colour scheme.

What do you guys think?







Heres a rough idea of the marque i want



I want to stay simple with the control panel



And heres some side art





What are your guys thoughts on this. also if you can see any design floors please let me know before i start this project. Thank you.

[BurgerKingDiamond]

really sweet idea man. I like dedicated cabs like this.

I would love to one day do either a Tecmo Super Bowl or Ice Hockey (NES games of course) cab. My friends and I would go nuts.

Actually the ultimate would be a dual monitor setup back to back so you can't cheat in Tecmo...

Good luck.

[emphatic]

Nice project! Virtua Tennis looks great on an LCD screen as well using a VGA cable. 

[mo1e]

Nice project! Virtua Tennis looks great on an LCD screen as well using a VGA cable. 

Yeah i have just bought a vga box from ebay yesterday. Im struggling to find some virtua tennis 1 sideart, Thats why ive opted for virtua tennis 4. Im just going to use players that are featured in virtua tennis 1. Also i will probably edit the control panel image in photoshop to suit my needs.

[mo1e]

Here it is with a rough artwork.. im not too sure on the colour scheme still though. Maybe i should also have the front of the cab white instead of green

[gbeef]

I would tweak the dash add some arrows maybe? and a top view tennis court image?

[emphatic]

It would look awesome if you cut a tennis ball in half, cut slits in them to be used as speaker grills. Not sure how it would sound though. 

[ScottoKong]

Strings for speaker grills!

Game Set MATCH!!!

[mo1e]

It would look awesome if you cut a tennis ball in half, cut slits in them to be used as speaker grills. Not sure how it would sound though. 

As bad as the sound quality may be. i actually love that idea. The vga box arrived today for my dreamcast. Also as this is my first project im wondering what wood you guys recomend, For ease of use and for weight.

[mo1e]

Top Spin is better and that way you could use an Xbox.

Ouch cant believe you just went there 

[BurgerKingDiamond]

4 player Mario Tennis FTW!

[mo1e]

Ok done a little bit of work on gimp of how i want the control panel to look... Before yo uask i am british thats why i chose tim henman. he is also in the game so that influenced me alot too.



Also what wood do you guys recommend i use for the build?

[emphatic]

Can I just ask what type of sticks and buttons you're going with?

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

The way I see it, the angle of the control panel is quite a bit too steep; I can imagine you'll get cramps in your hands and wrists quite quickly.

Also (and that's a matter of taste, of course) I'd use a less agressive colour/ colour scheme, maybe colours that you see a lot on a tennis court. Black, White, yellow maybe?

Btw most people here use MDF as wood, although it must be painted to look good it's very easy to work with.

[mo1e]

The way I see it, the angle of the control panel is quite a bit too steep; I can imagine you'll get cramps in your hands and wrists quite quickly.

Also (and that's a matter of taste, of course) I'd use a less agressive colour/ colour scheme, maybe colours that you see a lot on a tennis court. Black, White, yellow maybe?

Btw most people here use MDF as wood, although it must be painted to look good it's very easy to work with.

I took that on board. and came up with this.

On the new cab the angle of the control panel is less. i have also angled the monitor as it was flat in the original design



I have also added a 2 way headphone socket to the front. As i can see my girlfriend getting annoyed with it been too loud. ( best to keep her happy)



Here is the new control panel lay out. although i will be using the tim henman artwork shown in the above posts

[emphatic]

Is there a special reason behind that button layout?

[mo1e]

Is there a special reason behind that button layout?

Well to be honest no.... i struggle when it comes to thinking of a layout that will work. the 2 black buttons are the right and left trigger buttons on the pad.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

I took that on board. and came up with this.

Looking good! Just a couple more tips though:

- Instead of using one big speaker, why don't you use two smaller PC speakers? Despite being cheap, they have really good sound quality (just don't spend significantly less than ten to fifteen dollars/ pounds/ Euros) and you'll get stereo sound. Such big speaker is total overkill for a bartop. Also, have you thought about the height of the speaker - remember, you need to put a light source into the marquee box as well. Additionally, I don't know whether it's intended this way (in this case just ignore what I'm about to say, it's your machine so it has to look the way you want it to), but the overhang on your machine looks a tad excessive to me and you could reduce it a lot if you used small speakers. Once again, sorry if this is the way you want it to look, I don't mean to criticise your personal taste, it just looks as if it's that big to accommodate that huge speaker you want to put in it.

- Regarding the control panel: remember that joysticks have mounting plates that you need to fit into the cp box. Your left joystick is so far on teh left that I can imagine that the mounting plate won't fit in.

- Button layout: check out slagcoins website:

http://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/mounting_layering.html

he has a ton of great info/ tips on how to design/ build your cp (he talks about joysticks in boxes, but the same principles apply), among them cutout templates for button layouts used in real arcade machines. (The short version: Just do two rows of three buttons with the L and R buttons on the right; you can either put them in straight lines (American layout) or curved (Japanese layout), and although it seems more logical to me to use a curved layout (after all, fingers have different lengths) this is largely a matter of preference, so just draw them on a piece of paper and try it out; you can also take an old show box and install a joystick and buttons in it, this way you can make sure that you know exactly what you want).

A headphone socket is always a good idea, I put one in my bartop as well. Now my wife just complains about my raging at the bullet-hell shooters because I'm terrible at them...

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Oh, and I don't see a coin/ credit button yet; may I recommend this one:

http://www.arcadeshop.de/product_info.php?item_number=430&products_id=430&language=en

It's got a lightbulb built in and you can put in a printout of a "25cents" or "credit" template or whatever which will look awesome when lit up from behind.

[ballboff]

Is this gonna actually be a dreamcast machine?  Cos if so, I think you can actually get arcade sticks specially designed for the dreamcast.  This would help in your control panel design...