I had to figure out a
way to mount the Ipac2 controller to the bottom of the arcade controls
panel, below shows what I came up with. I made a board tray out of
some scrap aluminum, drilled four holes and implemented the same spacers
and board mounting technique that I've used on my last four projects,
the whole thing will be attached with Velcro.
The micro switches on
the joysticks and bottoms of each button have three contact points - a
normally closed position, normally open position and a ground. I
used the normally open contact and wired each micro switch to its
corresponding location on the Ipac2 board.
Next I piggy backed
the ground wire to all of the switches for each player side and wired
them to the ground point on the Ipac2 controller board. While I
was at it I tidied it all up and then ran the USB cables to the Ipac2
and Matrix Orbital display.
I have a bad habit of
not ever letting good enough be good enough, the hardware I had would
have worked fine but I decided to beef up and change everything
out. Below shows the upgrade - a Zotac mini-ITX motherboard with
GeForce 7050, a Celeron 2.0 GHz dual core processor, 2GB of Crucial DDR2
667 memory, a 350W micro-ATX power supply and lastly a 320GB Western
Digital hard drive.
Since I am no longer
using the IDE adapted 16GB compact flash in this project I had to come
up with a mounting method for the larger hard drive. Good old
aluminum angle and plastic spacers to the rescue, below shows what I
came up with, it's a perfect fit.
I also had to come up
with a way to mount the larger power supply in a different location,
again I used aluminum angle that was cut, filed and drilled to fit...
alum-angle is awesome.
Mounting the new power
supply meant having to relocate the mother board, I drilled four new
holes and problem solved. With all the hardware installed it's
time to fire it up and install WindowsXP, drivers, updates and MAME32.
After the operating
system and programs were installed it was time to throw it together for
a test run. Below shows my 10 year old buddy Brent tearing up some
R-type, after playing around twenty or so other games I asked him what
he thought and he told me "Every kid should have one of
these."... true that.
Now that it is fully
operational I have decided to kick things into high gear and get it
finished, the one thing that it really needs is a marquee. I broke
out the Photoshop and started designing, it only took two attempts
before I came up with something I liked.
Once my design was set
I uploaded it to MAMEMarquees.com,
it cost $23.90 with shipping and a few days after placing my order a
professionally printed, perfectly sized and totally sweet custom marquee
was sitting in my mail box.
Stay Tuned - More Soon...
Page
1 - Page 2 - Page
3 - Page 4 - Page
5
