Singing Potatoes
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Saturday, 30 November 2002
Stage Two Complete

On Thursday and Friday of the Thanksgiving weekend, Karen and I went to visit my parents. Knowing that I would have two days of little to do but watch television, I brought along a project to work on.

Control Panel Prototype

It's the prototype of my first modular control panel for my MAME cabinet. On Wednesday night, I went out and bought a cheap piece of plywood and drilled most of the holes for the buttons and joysticks. On Thursday, I drilled the rest of the holes and wired everything up while watching football.

It's quite a bit longer than the real one will be; I wanted a place to mount the I-PAC on the prototype (it'll ultimately be housed within the main body of the cabinet). Originally, I'd planned on hacking keyboards for each control panel, but I realized that it would (a) be a lot more work to solder all the buttons to the encoder matrix, (b) be difficult to avoid key masking/ghosting, especially for the two-player games with dual joysticks for each player, and (c) be more expensive in the long run, as I'd need to buy a new keyboard for each control panel.

The underside isn't pretty, but I don't really care. It works, and that's the important thing.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
Good job! So the control panels are modular - that means you can just swap them out depending on the game? Cool!

I'm just glad you've chosen to use your powers for good.
Posted by Darren on 1 Dec 2002 08:01
Yeah, I figured modular was the way to go; I like too many different games with wildly different control-panel layouts.

I figure my first one should be a standard two-player setup with one joystick and four fire buttons each; that'll take care of the vast majority of the games I like. My second one will be a single-player setup with two trigger joysticks, a spinner and a few on-panel fire buttons, to cover games like Tempest, Tron, Battlezone, and so forth. I'll probably eventually want a third panel, but I haven't decided whether I want a three-player setup for games like Gauntlet and Rampage, or a two-player, two-joystick setup for things like Vindicators and Smash TV.

But I think I'll skip making a panel for the Mah Jongg hentai games, because I have no clue how to play them. They're nothing like the solitaire Mah Jongg I've encountered on the PC — and unfortunately, the instructions are all in Japanese. But they take a lot of buttons.

As for "good"... we'll see...

Posted by Godfrey on 1 Dec 2002 08:25
Hey - why haven't you made a post to this blog since November?
Posted by Karen on 3 Dec 2002 13:47
Well, my comment above was posted on December first...

Posted by Godfrey on 3 Dec 2002 14:05