"My Arcade" Bartop Project

[Zeosstud]

Happy Holidays All,
                               This is the 2nd project I have done using Bish's design, I want to thank him first for making it available to us all.  Nothing that amazing here but the detail work on this one is much better than my last.  The one unique thing about this project is how you turn on the notebook that's inside.  I had an extra Thinkpad A31 P4 notebook with docking station that the LCD screen had gone out on, worked great if hooked up to an external monitor, perfect.  I opened the docking station and looked at where the power button was, there were 5 points of contact that could be what I needed, I wired up a button switch and grounded the proper prong then using a slightly stripped end I touched each of the points I thought could be the hot point and hit the switch, bam, my second try was gold, the docking station turn on.  I fished the wires from the switch through the modem port hole on the back of the docking station, grounded the proper pin and soldered the hot pin and success, you can now turn the notebook on and off using an arcade button on the back of the cabinet.  I also mounted a network plate so it could be hooked up without opening the cabinet and snipped the end off the powerstrip and wired it up to the adapter you see.  Thanks to BYOAC member leapinlew for the tip about that piece.  Enjoy the pics and if you have any questions please post them and I will try to respond.














Thanks for your time, Happy Holidays...

Zeosstud

[tommy]

Looks good to me, the main thing is that you built the thing and are proud of what you've done.

Good job.

[psychotech]

Looking good !

Laptops in bartops ..Great!!, BUT ...How did you do the control panel front?

[leapinlew]

Very nice! Your power module turned out real nice. A professional touch.

[Zeosstud]

Psychotech - I am not sure what you mean by "how did you do the control panel front?"  If you asking whats it covered or painted in, I used the stinky vinyl you get from partexpress.com, if you asking what do the buttons do, the one on left is "esc" then "player 1" "Credit" "player 2" and on the right is "pause"  its interfaced with an IPAC so I use "player 1 + esc" for enter and another shifted command that escapes me at the moment.  I tried to keep it as simple as possible.  Loaded my compile of Mame that saves high scores on most games and gets rid of the "ok" and any other messages, kinda like that.  Mamewah is the front end and I have Arcade Jukebox 8, Mame and Daphne setup.  If I didnt answer your question please feel free to ask again.

Leapinlew - That professional touch was totally due to your suggestion, I have 3 more of those switches I can implement in future projects now, even easier since I know how to wire them up now!

Zeosstud