More Progress!

I took all these pics this evening, so everything here is current as of today. I made a few improvements since the last pics, including:

• New sheet of 1/4" thick plexiglass in front of monitor
  
• 5 buttons for each player
• Built-in USB WiFi adapter
• Replaced joysticks with Happ Competition sticks
  
• Headphone jack on the underside of control panel

I need to do something for a border on the plexi sheet. As you can see in the pic below, the pine rails are exposed and looking a bit rough. I'm thinking about masking off most of the center on the back, painting a 1" black border around the entire sheet, and then spraying a topcoat to protect the paint job for when the plexi is removed for maintenance. Anyone have any other ideas?


Also, the new buttons are not 100% perfectly placed with each other. It doesn't look terrible, but I'm thinking about building an additional control panel over top of this one, and extending the new one by two or three inches on each side to allow a more ergonomic and spacious control panel.

If you look closely, you'll also notice that the joysticks are different than what I originally went with. In the beginning, I had used two Mag-Stiks from Ultimarc, which are a good idea in theory. The Mag-Stik is a joystick that uses magnets to snap the stick back to center, which is great because you don't have to ever worry about springs going bad. However, after playing tons of games on the machine, I realized I didn't like the responsiveness of the Mag-Stik at all. It had very limited movement, and always seemed to "stick" when trying to move in circular motions. This was a real pain when trying to play games like Pac-Man or Burger Time. So, after toiling over it, I opted to buy a pair of Happ Competition joysticks, which are spring-loaded and have a much more flexible feel to them. I haven't been able to blame my suckiness at Pac-Man on my controls ever since. ;)

Now, let's have a look inside the cabinet, shall we?

This is the inside of the coin door. I am considering getting a third coin mech, as this cab has three slots for coin mechs, something I found a bit odd for an Asteroids cab. The original light bulbs were long-since blown out, and I had surprisingly little trouble finding replacements. I took one out to K-Mart and found a replacement within minutes. Who knew? Also, the switches at the bottom of the mechs are wired to [NUM5] on the I-PAC board, which tells MAME that a coin has been inserted.

Here we have the internal USB WiFi adapter, which has proven to be extremely handy. I got some 1/2" plywood blocks from work and secured them to the interior end panel with some 1" brads. I angled the top block up a bit so that I can slide the adapter in and out with relative ease. The further back I push the adapter, the more securely it fits.

This last pic is the motherboard. You can't see it too well, but it's held in by pine mounting rails with routed slots about 5/8" from the edge . Luckily, the original board was secured in the same way, so all I had to do was pry the bottom rail off, cut the staples, and re-attach the rail to allow the motherboard to slide in and out. It holds very well, and makes for very little modification needed to the original cabinet construction.

That's all for today. I just put in an order with EMDKAY for a new marquee to replace the Asteroids one. I just got a phone call this afternoon from the local glass shop saying that my plexiglass sheets are ready to be picked up for my marquee, also. I'll post pics when I have the marquee assembled and installed. Till then, feel free to leave any comments. You don't have to be a registered user of this site to comment, either.

Updating the Blog

It's been a long time since I updated the blog, so here we go. I actually was very busy working on the cabinet and got very far with it. I am still doing minor changes and tweaks to the machine here and there. I suppose, though, it'd be best to start from the top.

After sanding down the old rusty and beat-up control panel, I re-painted it with three coats of Rustoleum Hammered Metal paint, which is perfect for any metal surface on arcade machines. The texture really turned out beautifully. Also shown is the underside of the CP, with the I-PAC interface and buttons shown.


Since the taking of this picture, I have added five new buttons per player, which makes newer games playable. More pics are on their way. You can also see in these pircures that I have installed a custom-cut monitor bezel to hide the ugliness of the monitor's metal frame.



You'll also notice that the coin door buttons light up. I went to K-mart and bought some replacement bulbs and then wired up all of them directly to a 5v power connector on the ATX power supply. The result is pure vintage arcade. More pics coming soon.