Well, due to the remnants of Hurricane Francis I've had a few set backs with the old arcade. Due to the 6 inches of rain we got here on Wednesday night, we had some flooding in the basement where The Arcade is kept. Luckily I acted fast enough to get all the electronic parts out of it and lift it up on to a few 4X4's. However, the water was raising rather fast, so I had to transfer the cabinet two feet higher. Luckily, the water never got quite that high, so everything was spared. The only damaged part was my IR receiver that I fried when I was hooking everything back up and I used the wrong power supply with it. 9 VDC is NOT the same as 9 VAC! Don't ever think it will be either! So the moral of this week's lesson is this: If you're building a plane in your garage, make sure the wingspan is not greater than your garage door's width!

On a more arcade note, I started designing a new control panel. This new one with have a piece of plexi-glass over it to avoid splinters, and will have an extra, fifth joystick that is only a 4-way due to the fact that old school games like Pac-Man and such are just a dog gone pain with an 8 way! Pac-Man and the Ms. just don't know how to go diagonal! This extra joystick will be connected to the same inputs as the 8-way player one joystick. Also, I ordered all LEDs for the coin mech and power lights. First of all, the light they give is just cleaner, and I don't have worry about them burning out!
  ¶ 9/11/2004 04:00:00 PM

  So it's been a very long time since I've blogged on this last. Though it's been a very long time since I've worked on the old arcade. This weekend I decided to dust the old boy off and take 'er for a spin! I've been playing on the arcade for quite some time. I finally got some plexi-glass to cover the monitor frame. What I wound up doing was attaching 2X2's to the insides of the cabinet side panels and then screwing the monitor frame, and plexi-glass cover into those. It worked out great! I attempted to make an IR extender but after 2 failed attempts, I just sucked it up and paid the money for a good one.

I drilled a mounting hole in the speaker panel for the IR receiver and than ran wire to the splitter box for the unit. The splitter box allows me to extend IR receivers to 4 different devices. Allows keep expansion in mind. From the splitter box I ran an IR transmitter to the TV that basically just sticks right over top of the TV IR receiver. So now the TV remote works excellente and I can turn it on and off without that awkward hand curl I got used to doing.

Finally then this weekend I cut a hole in the side of the cabinet for the PC front the stick thru. This allows me to insert CD's and other media and USB devices easily without having to stretch around back.

Tool Tip: It may be worth it to have a good jigsaw. So out to the store and spend a little cash on one that won't struggle to cut thru 3/4" thick plywood and then tear it all up. A cheap one will still work, but in the time it would take you to go to the store and buy a good one, come back and cut your cuts, you still wouldn't be finished if you were using that old one.
  ¶ 9/06/2004 01:25:00 PM