Cocktail arcade cabinet buildlog

[evilteddy]

Well the holidays ended up being not nearly as relaxed as I thought they would be and now I'm back at school and the
forum will finaly let me log on again. I was delayed a bit during the holidays because I couldn't find a holesaw that would
work for the buttons then on the last day of the holidays I found one on a workbench out of either holesaw set. .

Seeing as I had already planned the holes for the buttons I did some quick smart drilling. I was going to show you pictures
of my precisely drilled holes and the arcade cabinet base stuck together but the photos have been downloaded on another
computer that is fairly riddled with viruses and I can't be bothered downloading them onto dad's computer as well.

In conclusion, you'll have to trust me, despite being slow things are looking good.

EDIT: My computer is free of viruses now but because of the delay these pictures are slightly out of date-





The start button is going to go in the middle up the top and the joystick holes have been drilled on the left for a 4 way and 8 way joystick.

[XCVG]

Oooh, look at the pretty colours.

[evilteddy]

Yes, like all other cabinets the buttons are prettyful.

I have cut out the holes for the start buttons with the small drill holes so the nubs on the
bottom of the start button stop the square button from rotating. I'll forgive you if you don't
understand what I'm talking about from that fractured sentence.

I'm ending work for today because the temperature is higher than 40 degrees and the shed gets
hotter than its outside surroundings.

[XCVG]

Forty degrees CELSIUS? That's hot! Forty degrees FARENHEIT? That's cold! Forty degrees KELVIN? You're dead!

In all seriousness, is it Celsius or Farenheit. If it's Celsius, how could it be so hot in January?!

EDIT: Wait, southern hemisphere. Nevermind. Is it true that toilets flush backwards?

[jleemero]

In all seriousness, is it Celsius or Farenheit. If it's Celsius, how could it be so hot in January?!

I live in the Northern Hemisphere (woo America, etc.), and around here we've been getting highs of 30 C.

[XCVG]

Must be pretty close to the equator.

[evilteddy]

That was 40 degrees celcius. Apparently the temperature will reach 44 degrees today but I'll still get some
work done before it heats up.

About the toilet thing, do your toilets have some kind of swirly thing going on? Our toilets don't have any
spin on them that I notice.

[evilteddy]

Long time no see guys,
after my first term of senior school I'm finally managing my schedule well enough to start doing work on the cabinet again as well as learning to use PIC microcontrollers. They're nifty little things. Unfortunately I can't get at a camera at the moment but what I have done is marked out and cut the hole for the screen in the table top.

I'll update pictures soon.

[evilteddy]

Well I'm back on track after getting sidetracked by those damn awesome PIC microcontroller. What got me onto the arcade
again you ask? It was simply frying my last PIC 16F628a and being unable to get one for a couple of weeks. That and realising that I really wanted to play Galaga and Pacman. Because my midcourse exams for year 11 are over I don't have many assessments for the rest of the term. Expect progress.

Oh and for anyone who was watching this thread and wanted to see pictures (which I believe is very probably no one) I'm sorry about lying in my previous post. Anyway the pictures below show what's happened in the last few days which is:

- Put filler around the edges of the tabletop to fill in the exposed honeycomb core.
- Take all the panels that I could visualise as a control panel and put them together.
- Put the base in the box so things can be placed inside without falling down onto the ground.
- Sanded lots of edges so they are now flush with other edges.
- Swore at the edges which went less than flush (in my defence not a lot of swearing or bad edges).

And the fruits of this effort is displayed below now in all new larger pictures to replace the thumbnails that Photobucket imposed on me.



That shed isn't really mine but I must take responsibility for a bit of the mess you can see in the background.

Cheers

EDIT: Just looking at my sig next to those pictures and my 3d model doesn't look too different from what the actual product is shaping up to be. Not too shabby.

EDIT: Another edit and this one isn't frivolous. Obviously I'm not miles away from painting so I want the opinions of YOU the Benheck forum goer on which colour I should use. I've never seen a cocktail cabinet in real life and I want some opinions from people whether you own a cocktail cabinet, played one once or have never played an arcade game but have a favourite colour that would be great for this cabinet.

Finally I will probably change my avatar soon because I had a birthday recently and a friend gave me an evil teddy bear. She even put a sinister mask on it and made badges that said "evil" to go on its chest. I think it would make an excellent avatar.

Hope to hear from you guys

Evilteddy

[evilteddy]

I spent the day today matching screen shots from emumovies with roms and working at attaching the control panel to the cabinet (I made a bit of a design mistake). I'm using Mala and I've spent a bit of time making things look good. It is shaping up excellently and even if the cabinet itself is not much to look at the software part will look great.

On the software side does anybody know how to get Zsnes to quit on pressing escape? At the moment it pauses the rom and brings up the options screen.

I also upgraded the graphics so instead of having an intel integrated graphics controller with 8 mb memory (the maximum) I have a radeon 9800. I think. I still can't get 60 fps in conker's bad fur day and a couple of other games in graphics intensive parts. I have a 2.6Ghz processor and 256 mb ram. I tried putting in another 256 mb stick of ram from another computer but it failed to speed the games up to 60 fps. Does anybody have any idea of what I should improve. Apart from this the games are mostly perfect with the new graphics card. I keep building up the MAME games collection and attaching screenshots to each one.

I also tried to use bootskin to set up a new boot screen and my motherboard was not very compatible. It works well enough after a bit of mucking around so I'm not changing the seemingly fragile and mystifying working boot skin working at the moment even though it isn't the one I wanted.

Speaking of screenshots I'll post some screenshots of the setup soon. Remember I still want some colour suggestions and some help on Zsnes and Project 64.

Evilteddy

[tom61]

Colors of a cocktail cabinet in the US is black for the top, black for control area, and wood-grain or black for the box itself.

I'd switch to SNES9x to remap buttons, as, IIRC, ZSNES has no config file to modify. You could also just program the iPac to output F10 as another key combo.

For getting up to 60FPS, probably increasing the FSB speed would be the most help.

[evilteddy]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give them a try and get back to you on how they work. As a colour black does sound good for the tabletop though I don't know if I want the entire thing black and I don't want to paint on a wood grain.

Thanks for the reply.

[evilteddy]

Another update in the project that has taken so long it has become an epic. I have put an undercoat on the arcade box itself and plan to sand it tommorrow and do another coat. In a bit of spare time playing around with PICs I also created a little circuit that will show how much money in the screen. I already have the coin counter on the first page that counts how many credits have been inserted but this takes the input and shows it on an LCD screen with a scrolling attract on the top line.

For those who are interested I'm reading the text in the top line from a table and then shifting through it. The LCD controller (HD7780?) has 40 memory locations on each line even though only 16 are visible at any one time. But ah you say, why does the bottom line not shift as well. The simple answer is that every time the display is shifted I call the routine/function which redraws the bottom line and uses how far the top line has shifted for how far along it should put the cursor on the second line. So it is moving in memory locations but not too the naked eye.

I also use the magical interrupt to increment the register which contains the number of coins. Without further ado here is a video of it working on a breadboard. I'm going to put it on some veroboard when it's finished and I've got saving to EEPROM working. Plus it will also eventually connect to the coin mechanism and not a bank of DIP switches



In real life the letters actually look like they're scrolling but filming it makes it look bad similar to filming a television I guess. Frames that we would normally gloss over are captured.

Comments are welcome,

Evilteddy

[evilteddy]

It's been a long time between posts however I have actually accomplished quite a lot. I didn't post here because I didn't think there was a lot of interest in the project however I was pleasantly surprised after seeing the view count on the topic so I decided to give an update on the progress.

I've painted the cabinet with and undercoat all over followed by a couple of coats of flat black on the main body of the cabinet and a couple of coats of glossy black on the control panel. After the many coats that I applied it looked quite stunning but in the time that followed it has lost some of its former splendour due to sitting in a dusty shed as I worked on controls and electronics. Nonetheless a quick wipe down will restore it to its former glory.

I've finished putting the controls onto the panel and wiring them into the keyboard encoder as well as wiring the two coin counters I have made to the coin mechanism and keyboard encoder.

I took apart the arcade computer and put the Hard drive, PSU and motherboard in the cabinet and every part of them is connected up nicely including the monitor which was a bit of a problem mounting. I eventually made some brackets with the help of a friend and we had to cut away a bit of the monitor's casing so it would fit which sort of defeats the purpose of keeping it cased which is to not expose the thousand volts contained within but the wooden bracket pretty much covers the hole anyway.

The video card I was using was constantly overheating which was a pain because it was much better than the onboard graphics chip. The problem was that the fan was nearly dead and it was a fairly small and wussy fan. The solution was to get a chunky bigger computer fan I had lying around and use it. A bit of cardboard glue in place acts as ducting so the air is directed into the right place. It works much better than before particularly as there is a lot more space for heat to disperse in.

Enough exposition, here are the photos:


The keyboard encoder in all its sphagetti monster glory.


The whole unit.


inside.


proof that it runs.

That's about it for now. I have the table top to finish and thats about it so there isn't long to go in this project.

Evilteddy

[tom61]

Pretty nice. Could we get links to bigger pics?