Yet again, I am having trouble sleeping at night. I keep waking up during the night, been happening a lot lately: anyway, just been up for just over an hour and a half, designed and refined posting this drawing, then back to bed again.
This is exact, millimeter perfect. I will use it as a template as the top sheet will be 2mm clear plastic, so I can transpose the image and make my holes in the plastic and smooth all cut areas. This will take a while to do to get it right, and I only have 2 sheets of this material (unless I order more and wait for it to arrive of course). I am expecting to waste a sheet, hope I don't waste both!
As the D-pad and joystick need to be mounted through the plastic sheet, I will incorporate an area above the plastic around each button/raised area to make it look uniform. The underside (apart from the area for the PSone screen of course) will be spray painted, this will give a very sheeny appearance on the top, be impossible to rub off and will be completely smooth. I decided to go for "angular" design as this is interesting; hence the corners in the pic. There will in effect be two tone - the gloss sheen from the plastic and the slightly more matt colour of the button surrounds and sides of the case.
I am not trying to impress with my drawing, it is done by hand and not graphic drawing (I could have done this if I had wanted), nor is this a concept drawing, it is the real thing, so it is a template. That is why the circles are not perfect circles too. The rectangle in the middle is the screen (of course) - the viewing size of the screen, not the surround.
I will have the front of the case completely flat.
There is a considerable amount of work yet to do, not just making the case front and back and sides, but also I need to make the shoulder buttons and their area, the slots for the switches; make the buttons work nicely on the tact switches and get them, and my home made buttons, to the right height in the case - I want them fairly low mounted.
If I had managed to get the TI card working properly (may be a faulty one I had), I could have included the Expansion Pack as I would have had enough power to run it; I have enough room for it, never mind, I can always upgrade the system later if I want to - easy enough to do. Plenty of space for batteries if I do this at a later stage too, however as discussed before, I am staying with mains power on purpose, out of choice.
Anyway, the pic:
The black circles are the speaker grills, I just put them on top. I will probably have them slightly smaller when mounted. The "Z" button will be under the unit (left side).
I am using smoothed edged wood for the sides, hence the 4mm surround on the drawing to allow for this. The vertical dashed lines are just to illustrate the size of the N64 mobo, for interest.
I could have made the system very small if I had wanted, as the finished design only needed to be wide enough to take a joystick after all; however, as discussed before, the aim isn't to make it small but to make it comfortable to hold. you will notice the "C" buttons are in a sweep position to match the sweep from my forefinger. The final size of my case will be 297mm wide and 185mm high (excluding top of cart showing at the top of the case). This height (about the height of a boxed N64 game) is ideal for me and the width of the case gives me space for my fingers to rest behind the unit comfortably.
On the top of the case, alongside the N64 cart, will be the switches, on/off switch, power in plug, the PSone volume and contrast buttons and switch to select a different save slot on the N64 memory card (as a 1mb card, you can press a button to select between 4 x 256kb areas).
I am undecided as to colour of the system - toying with gloss black; although considering white/creme or cream colour. Any views guys?? I am tempted with white or pale cream colour but also tempted with black...
Rush it and I will lose the professional finish I have so far. At this rate, I might not need to worry about the top edges (grey).
