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| MAIN | Control
Panel
On the first machine, the control panel was the first thing we built (mainly because we wanted to start playing games asap). This time we waited until the end to build the control panel. I don't really know if there's any advantage one way or another, although we were able to construct the control panel to better fit the cabinet the second time. We decided upon a 4 player layout for this machine. Players 1 and 2 would have 6 buttons apiece; 3 and 4 would have 3 buttons each. I chose Happ Super joysticks based on my experiences with the previous machine. The Ultimates are WAY too loose for my taste and they don't roll well. The Supers aren't the greatest for 4-way games (like Ms. Pacman), but they are usable. I believe they are the most solid of the 8-way joysticks Happ sells. Ultimate pushbuttons were chosen, simply because they're the standard (concave) buttons on any arcade machine. We started off by sketching drawings on a full size piece of wood to see how different layouts would look and feel. We settled on a fairly deep control panel that extended about 6 or so inches off either side of the cabinet.
The holes were drilled using 1 1/8" drill bit for both buttons and joysticks. A square area on the underside of the panel was routed out for each joystick to allow them to sit closer to the surface. This ultimately would allow more of the joystick to stick out of the control panel.
The sides were attached using metal L brackets and wood glue. Again, don't cut the slanted pieces until you get most of the sides assembled. This way you can directly measure how big to make them. Before attaching the sides, the top piece was taken to a nearby plastics company. We had them make a 1/8" plexi-glass overlay for it. This cost about $120 dollars, but saved us the trouble of breaking 50 sheets ourselves. Plexi-glass is very difficult to work with if you don't have the right tools. We got all of our pieces of plastic from American Plastics in Columbus, OH.
A coat of polyurethane was placed on the top of the panel, and then the joystick bottoms were attached. We wanted the bolts for these to be underneath the overlay and unseen from the top. Next, we placed Contact paper over the top. We chose a marble looking paper that ended up looking pretty cool. The piece of plexi-glass was then placed on top of the contact paper. We didn't bother screwing it in as the buttons alone did a good job of holding the plastic to the panel.
Next came the wiring. This seemed to be the most tedious part of the project, mainly because the Dreamcast was a huge pain in the ass to get working. We used a MK64 Keyboard Encoder purchased from Ron. I highly recommend this encoder. It is very easy to program and configure, and we've had no problems with it at all. It's only $63 which is significantly cheaper than other commercial encoders. Ron also offers excellent technical support if you're having problems,. We used 4 barrier strips purchased from Radio Shack and quick disconnects purchased from Home Depot. The computer part of it was wired using the standard method, which uses daisy chained grounds and wiring the NO (normally open) of each button to the encoder. We borrowed most of the Dreamcast wiring tips from the DC2Jamma page. In addition to the precise soldering that needed to be done, we ran into a bunch of other problems. Forgive me if this gets confusing. It seemed that when the Dreamcast was powered on, it would not register any controllers as being connected. At first we thought we fried another Dreamcast (reminiscent of the abandoned Dreamcast idea from the first machine). Upon further investigation (using Ron's encoder testing program) we found that all of the arcade buttons wired to Dreamcast were registering as "stuck down" on the encoder. This meant that the buttons were being pressed without really being pressed. Upon further testing we found that the Dreamcast controllers were letting a small current through that activated the buttons. I think this was due partly because of the goofy shoulder buttons on the Dreamcast (+3v normally). I had some diodes left over from Radio Shack when I installed the counter on our old machine, so we tried a couple of these between the Dreamcast controller and the arcade buttons to try and eliminate the small current that was passing through. Sure enough, it worked. We added diodes to all the rest of the buttons and everything seemed to work properly. The diodes we used were silicon diodes 4004 and 4002. I think most any small diodes will work though, zener or silicon. Later on we discovered that if the encoder PS/2 cable was not plugged into the computer, one of the Dreamcast controllers would not work. I have no idea why this is, and I never bothered to figure out why. I was just happy it was working. It could possibly be because of the encoder we were using or the grounds that were all tied together, but I really don't know. Email Keith, he's the one who wired this part of it ;)
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