Jubei:Rob's Arcade Cabinet
The Control Panel
| First I assembled the control panel. It was the smallest and easiest part ;) I simply built the box, And drilled the holes in the control panel surface to accomodate the trackball, buttons, and joysticks. A hole in the back of the box allows the cables to get to the PC, and velcro holds the panel nice and snug in place on the box, but still allows me to easily get inside... and I even have a spare piece of wood if I ever want to build a second set of controls (A pair of spinners? A yoke? 4 players for all out TMNT/X-Men/Gauntlet/Simpsons action?). I covered up screw holes with little wood plugs. They are noticable if you get close, but from a foot or 2 away, you won't notice. I did make a minor mistake with the front piece of wood. Had I been thinking I would probably have changed the direction of the grain... cut the piece verticly instead of horizontally. I think it would just look a little cleaner. |  |
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It took a lot of careful planning to layout the console itself. I
decided on a fairly conservative layout for all my buttons, but I'm
pleased with it. The prototype helped a lot
for deciding on spacing for buttons and location of each part... I
also figured that by having four spare buttons up top, I'd have a little
room to grow if the need arose.
And here it is all assembled. Kathleen
sanded, stained, and put many coats of polyurethane on to give the whole
thing a really beautiful glossy finish. The buttons are pretty easy: 6
buttons for each player, and an 8 way joystick. Each player also gets a Coin
button and a Start button. The purple buttons are Tab (menu), F2, F12
(Screenshot), and ESC. I'll probably replace F2 with pause. I thought that
the menu paused the game, but i was wrong. The black buttons below the
trackball are the left/right mouse buttons.
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