Hey all, I apologize for the late response on this thread but I had a death in the family so everything got put on hold. On a positive note, when everything was back to normal I was able to complete the build. I've summarized my build to note huge mistakes that have costed me time and money. Hopefully, this will help those starting a build.
Building the Pedestal - I wanted simple and functional. Severdhed's design was perfect for me and I was lucky he shared all the details/measurements to make this part easier. Although I modified it to be a 2 player console it gave me the base that I needed. Time spent - 1 day + adding hinges/changing to lock later. I might have failed to mention that I wanted to build this for the work place so it had to blend in with the environment. Hence no fancy graphics and plain black.
Joystick/buttons - This part was simple just make sure you do your homework on correct wiring. Although the wiring was a piece of cake I made the mistake of buying an Ebay joystick/buttons,controller card combo. The joysticks were advertised as "Competition Happ" but it was far from it. I wasn't able to hit the diagonals consistently for fight games which cause me to spend a ton of time tweaking settings in Mame, Maximus and trying different drivers in windows 7 thinking it was the controller card. I even reached back out to the vendor and got a replacement only to be in the same boat. After reading old threads in the archive I realized it was the joystick. Bought new Competition joysticks and resolved my diagonal issues. Don't try to save a buck on this department and get the real stuff you won't regret it.
Software/Frontend - This part consumed 80% of my build. I thought this part would be a piece of cake but I was so wrong. Good thing I had help from a friend who was smart in this department but his availability was limited which further extended the build. Verifying that every game launched/worked correctly and was able to toggle back & forth between the menus took the most time.
PC - I pulled together an old PC with donated parts to lower cost since this was out of my pocket and it was for the workplace. Got it together and it worked great (for about a week) and paid the price later cause the hard drive crashed. My saving grace was it was only the secondary HD that crashed which we installed all the programs on and the ROMS/config files were still in the primary safe. I ordered a new hard drive and working getting it running again as we speak.
Overall thoughts on build: I regret holding off on this build as long as I did waiting for the perfect time to start it. My 2 cents is to just start it! Don't got cheap on everything like I did cause you will pay for it later. Overall, I had such a great time putting this build together that I'm already planning on my next build which will be a tabletop mame. If anyone had any suggestions or guidance on that it would be greatly appreciated! Happy building everyone!
**The attached picture looks a off but the TV is actually a 65". The pedestal is set back about 12'.
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Topic: 1st build - 2 player pedestal (Read 17585 times)
