Main > Main Forum

Hitting a mental and financial wall on the cab.... Advice?

<< < (3/4) > >>

PL1:
I'm reminded of the old ad where the guy said, "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later."

If you intend to add a trackball and/or spinner, buy the encoder for where you eventually want to be. If you don't, you may end up spending much more by the time you get all the upgrade parts.

If you want to be able to easily add or adjust the panel configuration and contents, a modular design is a great way to go. You will invest a bit more up front, but you have way more flexibility later.

Here's a version of the venerable Doc's Modular idea:

It uses 6"x 8" removable/swappable panels.  Protip: Make more panel blanks than you think you need. (Future expansion, build errors, enthusiastic players. . . .)

On the trackball panel, you can see holddown tabs--made from cutting up L-brackets--on the underside of the panels.

The grey holddown bar is 3/4" aluminum square stock with holes drilled to allow knobs (orange) with threaded shafts to tighten into tee nuts below.

To swap panels, unscrew the holddown bar knobs and lift it out. panels slide back and lift out.

You can start with the Mini-Pac Opti. and harness.  Later on, you can add a U-Trak that plugs into the harness.

A TT2 spinner with its own USB encoder can be added whenever you like. You won't want to put a spinner on the Z-axis due to the way windows handles the inputs.

One last tip that may save you some big money on a triggerstick: Paradise Arcade's Import Flight Stick
http://www.paradisearcadeshop.com/en/imported-joysticks/299-import-flight-stick.html

Scott

Brian74:
I started this journey back in 2010. I bought a cab from a guy who was going to do the same as I was but lost interest in it. I got the sanded down cab with a 20 inch crt monitor. I ended up with a 2 player 6 button each. The more research I did I knew that wasnt enough controls. So I made my control panel bigger, was still 2 players 6 buttons but i added a trackball and a 4way. Here it is almost 2 yrs later to the day. That cab not sits in my garage because I wasnt happy with the screen size. I bought a gutted golden tee/silver strike cab and a 26 inch lcd. The lcd fit but the viewing angle was all wrong, it looked washed out. So here I am, sitting here with a almost complete Taz slim cab. To trick it out I bought 25 Clear IL Translucent Pushbutton PSL-L from paradise arcade. I also got Electric ICE™ RGB Trackball Lighting Upgrade Kit and 2 led-wiz from groovy game gear. My pc has been upgrade over the yrs too. So if you build something, try to build it where you can upgrade it. Make the holes for a spinner and a 4 way if you want them later. Just plug them in the cp til you have the $, same with the trackball. you can but the hole and route it get a mounting plate. The plexiglas will cover the hole anyway.

Brian74:
Here is a picture of my 2nd cp

eds1275:
What others have said is pretty good advice. Have you considered going LCD? You could get a 4:3 LCD for cheap or free if you look hard enough. Then you can slim it down and make both sides of your machine out of 1 4x8 sheet of plywood, and the front and back out of another. Maybe leave the lower back side of the cab completely open if it'll be back against a wall. It allows easy access for the PC and makes less work building a removable panel or door.

On both of the cabs I made, I made the control panel fit between the sides of the cab. It looks cleaner to me than having wings extend out from the cab. My control panels need no sides, back, or bottom and are not [easily] removable - they have no extra bits like hinges and are easily accessed from the inside. Though I didn't do this to cut cost, it sort of happened on it's own.

As for the upgrading of your computer, maybe try going back to an earlier version of mame. Many of the games ran better on older versions. Perhaps boost the ram up. Try shutting down services and startup items that aren't needed.

Anyways, best of luck. Here's the dimensions of my Spinal Tap cab if you are interested.



BobA:
Brian74, try turning your LCD upside down.   The view from the top is usually alot less washed out then the view from the bottom.   This is because we view the screen either evenly or from some height.   Since we do not sit at a desk that lets us look uo thru the keyboard the view from below is cr#p.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

Go to full version