Jimmy's Arcade! Old School Style!

2004-09-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

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!

2004-09-06T13:25:00.000-04:00

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.

2004-05-22T16:27:00.000-04:00

Wow! It looks like it's been over a month since I've done anything on The Arcade. Well, I haven't been home for a weekend in a long while. It was nice to get back to work. Moving on to arcade stuff. I sanded a little off the keyboard drawer so now it slides much easier. I attached the front of the draw with cabinet door snaps for now. You can't open the drawer with the front or you pull it right off. I can either make the drawer still slide easier, or attach the front in a more permanent way. Don't know the resolution quite yet.

I also added a power button on the side near the top of the unit. I used the light-up push button for this, so it looks pretty cool when you turn it on, and from the side you can easily see that the PC is indeed on. Also I wired the lights on the coin slots to the power of the PC. It makes it easy since the light-up push button and coin slots take 12V DC, I just used the 12V DC coming right from the PC power supply.

Finally I received the monitor frame a few weeks ago and I cut it to fit today. I'm not sure how I'm going to turn the TV on once I mount it, but I'm thinking of extending the receiver on the TV so I can use the remote.

Oh, I also mounted the marquee light. Let me tell you, my marquee better be close to black because this light is about as bright as the Sun. Use the same precautions, don't stare into the light!

2004-04-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

I finally made the keyboard drawer today. Since the monitor stand got in the way, I decided to put my drawer sliders on their own 2X2. This involved the least amount of cutting and actually made the drawer look quite good. I just used nails and some wood glue to hold it together. Since people will be looking inside the drawer, I didn't want to have metal brackets and stuff holding it together. I put the handle on the front of the drawer but I have yet to secure the front of the drawer on the rest of the drawer. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do that. I would like to be able to make the front fold down, but that might be out of the question due to drawer location, which was due to the stupid monitor stand. Anyway, all I really need to do beside secure the drawer front is sand a little off of the 2X2's that the sliders are mounted to. This should allow the drawer to slide almost effortlessly.

2004-04-19T21:19:00.000-04:00

Today I screwed on the speaker grills. I wasn't too sure if I was going to use them because you could sort of see right thru them, but I do like how they look and if the see-thruness really bothers me I can always get some really black mesh to block the view of the square speakers that lie beyond.

2004-04-13T21:14:00.000-04:00

I soldered up the coin slot to the 9-pin connector. Well, actually I used those crimp on ones and I was quite disappointed. Next time, I'll be using the soldering ones once again. But the coin slots do work. I tested them out and everything looks good. I'll have to figure out some way to make the wire look a little neater, but that's miniscule stuff.

2004-04-10T12:46:00.000-04:00

Today I bought serial connector ends that I will use to connect the coin mech to the IPac keyboard emulator. I could just wire it straight in, but if ever want to take the control panel off, it would be a huge hassle. This way I will just plug the coin mech into the back of the control panel which will be connected to the IPac. I'm used to soldering connector ends, but the ones I bought are crimp-able. I don't know what I use to crimp them, but I may have to find out. If you've ever tried to solder your own 9 pin, or 25 pin connectors it's a real hassle. I usually wind up melting some of the black plastic and that always smells good.

2004-04-09T15:32:00.000-04:00

I finally cut what I thought was going to be the last few pieces today. First I cut out the front of The Arcade where the coin mech will go. I used the circular saw for the sides and a jigsaw for the inner hole for the coin mech to fit. The coin mech itself has rounded edged that I measured to be 1.5 inched in diameter. The coin mech fit perfectly! Once I screwed the wood and mech into place, The Arcade is looking wonderful! The second piece I cut was for the base of the keyboard drawer. I designed the drawer to big quite big so I could throw extra junk in it if I needed to. Unfortunately, Since I had to reposition the TV stand, the drawer does not fit now. The end of the drawer hits the first 2X2's I glued into place for the TV. Since I can't take those 2X2's out (I glued them in there and wood glue create a bond stronger than the wood itself) I will either have to make the drawer not as deep and buy new sliders for it, or make the drawer not as wide and mount it on 2X2's also so the drawer will no longer hit the 2X2's that used to support the TV. I haven't decided which option yet to take. Sometimes I just don't think ahead enough.

2004-04-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

The PC came today. Everything looked great expect for the missing processor. Of course this happens to be the most important component of a PC. I called TigerDirect and asked them what was up. Now I have to wait for an investigation to take place and call them back on Tuesday. I will not except "tough luck" as answer. And I will blast the company if they do not make good. I've never had a problem ordering from there before. Their prices are great and usually their service is too. Let's hope they can still keep me as their customer.

2004-04-04T21:29:00.000-04:00

I ordered the arcade PC today. I figured I'd go high-end just in case I ever wanted to use it for something else. It's a 3.0 GHz P4 with 800MHz FSB motherboard. We're talking uber fast here! Also I decided to go with 512 Mb of DDR RAM and a Radeon 9200 video card. I bought a cheap-o case that came with a free 425W power supply. I don't care about the looks since you won't be able to see it anyway. All together it only cost me $700! Quite a steal I believe. It should be here the 8th of April so I'll be able to test drive the arcade then! Oh yeah!

2004-04-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

Things have been going pretty well. I've added the monitor stand and test fitted the 27" TM I'm using as a monitor. The first time I got the stand a bit too low. Lucky for me, I already glued and screwed in the 2X2 supports for the stand. So, I just added another 2X2 on top of the old one and re-secured the TV stand. It's not the ideal way of doing, but I figure it can't hurt anything. No one sees the inside anyway. Anyway, with the extra 1.5" adjustment, the TV looks great! So far I haven't been able to test it due to the fact that my current video card likes to malfunction when I'm using the S-Video output and Microsoft Windows boots up. Microsoft Windows seems to have issues with NVidia cards so I'm thinking that my arcade PC will be using a Radeon instead. Despite my devotion to NVidia who took over the glorified Voodoo FX cards that I absolutely loved. Never had a problem with one. But, I guess the wonderful days of Voodoo are now over and so is my devotion to their appropriator.

2004-03-20T22:22:00.000-05:00

The weekends are about the only time I get to work on this thing any more. Oh well. It beats sitting around doing nothing. At least right now it does. So today I started assembling The Beast. I first glued some 2 X 2's to the main sides to act as a support for the floors and tops. Once the glue dried I used 8 X 1 1/2 zinc wood screws to hold the wood firmly. After that, I started connecting the sides together with the floor boards and then the top and top-back panel pieces. It came together real nice. I still have to mount a base for the monitor and a front panel to house the coin mech and the speaker mount. Once I get those done, the hard part will be done.

Handy Tool Tip: If you're using your drill to screw in your screws, you may want to use something other than zinc screws. They seem to strip pretty easy at times, and then they break your drill bit other times. At least they could do just one or the other and make things easy on me.

2004-03-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

It's been a few weeks but I'm back to work on the arcade once again. On Thursday I went to the local lumber store and purchased 3 sheets of 4' X 8', 3/4" oak plywood. Here's some advice when going to your local lumber store. Don't! It's too darn expensive. I could have bought the same thing at Lowes for about 1/2 the price I paid for it. Oh well. Here's to supporting the local economy. Today I started drawing and cutting out my pieces. I'm about half done so far. I should have all my pieces cut and some of them sanded by night fall.

Tool Tip: Make sure you have a hardy jigsaw. It will help out a great deal! A little plastic one gets hot and smells and takes FOREVER to cut just a few inches on 3/4" thick piece of wood. It's why I have a circular saw for the straight pieces.

2004-02-23T22:16:00.000-05:00

Well the larger wire leads did the trick. I crimped up all my grounds and plugged everything in. The control panel works like a charm! I am very pleased with the I-Pac and its performance. I played some two player fighting action on Saturday and experienced no delays and no non-functional button presses. It's extremely easy to use and well worth the price. Once I had all the dip switches wired up, I used some wire ties to make things look a little neater. Neatly directed wires will always make troubleshooting easier. Eventually I'm going to borrow a wire labeler from work so I can troubleshoot even faster. The next step now is starting construction on the cabinet itself. I'm wrestling with the idea of using a TV monitor instead of a PC monitor. Although I won't get as crisp a picture, I will get a bigger screen. I'm still debating. Let me know your thoughts.

I've got some plans drawn up for the cabinet so I may buy some wood later this week. Until then, I'll be updating my game database. Boy a few months slip by and next thing you know, there are 1000 updates, changes and additions to catch up on.

2004-02-18T21:24:00.000-05:00

Wires, wires, and more wires. That's what I did today. After giving directions twice to my house, I finally got my package today. I was very pleased to see a nice I-Pac ready to go. Now all I had to do was wire my 50 switches in and I'd be all set. After about 4 hours, I have half of them done. I've crimped and wired up all the buttons, but I have yet to crimp and wire up each button GND. I ran into some crimping issues as I'll need larger fork-shaped wire leads, or thinner wire. I'll buy whatever cheaper tomorrow. Luckily I'll be out in The Big City for The Expo so I won't need to drive another hour out of my way. Hopefully, I'll kickin' some TMNT a** by Friday afternoon.

A Small Tip: When you're wiring up your joysticks take careful notice as to which switch is triggered when you move the joystick. When you move the joystick left, the right switch is tripped, when you move it right, the left switch is tripped. The same principle applies for up and down motion as well. Then when you turn your control panel over to wire, you'll have a backward joystick. Just keep this in mind.

2004-02-16T20:46:00.000-05:00

I never purchased anything from overseas before. A little advice. If you're buying something that is being shipped out of London, you better hope that you don't live in a very rural area. If that is the case you'll have to tell the shipping company how to get to your house. Which may be difficult because you live in a rural place and there really are NO direction to your house. "Well you take the half dirt road to the gravel road, then turn onto the street with the run down house on the corner." Good luck with that one.

The shipping was only about $15 or so, so it wasn't a big deal. I justified the expense of the iPac (which is the piece I am referring too) by remember I bought a keyboard Y-adapter which was about $50. Now I won't need that. So, in the end, everything worked out!

2004-02-12T22:03:00.000-05:00

Another trip to Lowes today. Here's a little more advice. If you live 30 minutes from the nearest hardware store, I suggest you save yourself countless of hours in the car by buying all that you need the first trip. Today I drove one hour to get 4 little friction wheel clamps. These little buggers hold my control panel to the box assembly. You'd think the thing was bolted down. And my remaining push buttons came yesterday. The whole panel looks great!

I sucked it up a few days ago and bought an iPac. I'll be using this to interface my buttons with my PC. It's not as cheap as a keyboard but I'm told I won't get that obnoxious ghosting effect and it will make wiring quite easy. I'm waiting on that to arrive. When it does, I'll let you know.

2004-02-10T21:51:00.000-05:00

Lots of work today. Not a lot to report on, it just took a long time. I nearly finished up the control panel box assembly. All I have left is to attach the panel to the box. My last arcade I just used screws but I had to open and close the darn thing so much I wore the holes out. This time I'm going to use clamp-like devices much like the ones that keep your bathroom cabinets closed. This way the panel will clamp on tight, but can be easily be opened for troubleshooting and repair.

2004-02-09T20:39:00.000-05:00

Not a whole lot of arcade makin' action today. I did start to draw out my control panel box assembly and even managed to cut and sand a few pieces before dinner. Since the actual panel is much larger than my last one, I decided to make the box assembly larger as well. I'm still throwing around the idea of where to put my pull-out keyboard drawer. Should I put it in the control panel box or in the arcade stand? It's still up in the air. I am giving the panel a slight incline to make game play a little comfier. I should have all sanding done tomorrow. Hopefully I'll have the box assembly done the day after that so I can play a few games before I head out for the weekend.

2004-02-08T19:56:00.000-05:00

Today I started to construct the control panel. After a day of planning, I was ready to cut my wood up. I went out to the garage and dragged the two work horses that were up in the attic down and set up shop. It was a bit nippy, but I didn't mind. Things started off pretty well. I cut the shape I wanted with my jigsaw and then I cut out the hole for the trackball. The trackball assembly fit nit and snug! I couldn't have gotten a tighter fit! Next I started drilling the holes for the joysticks. When I got to the holes for my pushbuttons I decided I needed a different drill bit. The pushbuttons require a 1.125" diameter hole to nest in. Although I had a drill bit, it didn't make the wood look too good. So I set off to Lowes again. I brought along a joystick and figured while I was there I might as well pick up some nuts and bolts for the joysticks. I found a great drill bit called a Forstner Bit. It made perfect holes and it made them quickly and very neatly. I highly recommend using one for button holes. Once I picked that up I set off for some nuts and bolts. Stupidly enough, Ultimate Joysticks require metric bolts. I wanted to use Carriage Bolts since they are round with no screwdriver dips or edges to rip your flesh on. Unfortunately they don't come in metric. At least, not here anyway. The smallest Carriage Bolts were 1/4 inch. This was slightly too big for the joystick holes but was all I could use. I decided to use these and just drill the joysticks with a 1/4 inch bit to make the holes bigger. I remember doing this on my last arcade but couldn't remember why I did it. I won't forget that again. Once I got back I drilled my holes and sanded the control panel down. Very smooth, and very nice. Things fit perfectly! After I cleaned up the mess, I put all the pieces in. It's big, but nice. I'll have to build the control panel box later this week so I can play with it soon.

2004-02-07T22:34:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot, the right side over there will have pictures soon. As soon as I can find some webspace somewhere. Anybody have any extra?

2004-02-07T22:27:00.000-05:00

Finally, I have the blog up-to-date. Today I started designing the control panel. I picked up some wood the other day at Lowes. They know, you know? Anyway, since my last design was for two players only, I wanted to make this one work for up to 4 (I realized that playing with 4 players simultaneously is way more fun than just two). So my layout is a little bigger than my last. Actually it's a lot bigger. Players one and two will have one joystick and 8 buttons each. Players 3 and 4 will have one joystick and 4 buttons each. I couldn't find anyone else on the web who has tackled a layout this big before, so this is completely ground-breaking! Don't forget about the trackball and four player-select buttons there either. I spent over half the day designing the darn thing so everything fits and if 4 people are playing, hands and arms don't get in the way of Turtle bashing or Simpson punching. Here are a few tips if you want to tackle a 4 player environment such as mine.

Make button, joystick and trackball templates on paper that you can easily cut out and mark right on your panel. This will save lots and lots of time!

Don't forget that arms and hands will be all over the place during game play! Place your components strategically (much like a good game of chess) so that no one is knocking into any other person. It may help to gather 3 of your friends and pretend you're playing an imaginary version of X-Men.

The majority of 4 player arcade games (at least, the ones I know of; new ones may have come out in the last few years I haven't seen yet) have only 2 buttons per player. So don't worry if buttons 3 thru 8 on players one and two are blocked by arms using the third and forth joysticks. However, make sure all 8 buttons are easily accessible if only two players are playing.

Keep this in mind: Your first layout WILL NOT work! I promise! But you always need a first one, so there's no avoiding this fact.

After I finished the layout I found I needed a few more buttons. I placed an order to Happ Controls for four more Ultimate Pushbuttons. I also go a light-up momentary contact pushbutton for the main CPU power. It was only 6 bucks, I figured I might as well see how it looks.

2004-02-05T21:14:00.000-05:00

Two days ago, I interfaced my Happ Trackball with my $3 cheapo PC mouse. All it involves a little soldering (by little, i mean little tiny bits of solder) and a little patients. First thing you have to do, is de-solder the LED emitter and detector on the mouse. There are two of each of these. One for control of the x-axis and one for control of the y-axis. These will generally be on both sides of the axis disk. These disks are very easy to spot as there are only two disks inside a mouse. Before I forget, this has to be a ball mouse. An optical mouse will NOT work here. Since the emitter is a transistor, it will have three leads. De-solder them and toss the emitter. The emitter is usually clear or white, while the detector could be any color from red to black. Once you de-solder both emitters from the mouse, identify the detectors. You don't have to de-solder the detectors but it does make it easier. Once you have found the detectors, solder a wire to each lead of the detector. Or if you chose to de-solder the detector, sold a wire for each hole you left on the circuit board. Next, you'll need to identify the detector on the trackball.

Here's what's going on here. What I'm doing is tricking the PC into thinking the mouse is moving when in actually it's the trackball moving. Basically what I'm doing is having the trackball detect the ball movement and then send that information back to the mouse to be processed. The mouse thinks its getting signals from its own detector and decodes the transmission as such. Because these emitters and detectors are all the same, you can connect your happ trackball to any trackball mouse.

Once you find the detector on the trackball, you need to connect the wires you soldered onto the mouse to the detector on the trackball. DO NOT de-solder anything from the trackball! You need the emitters and detectors on that if you want it to work. The main problem now is which lead from the mouse should be connected with the trackball. Happ makes this slightly difficult by having the detector on its trackball have 4 leads instead of the standard 3. Not a problem though. If you hold your mouse so the green side is facing you and the middle lead of the detector on-hand is lower than the other two leads, we'll call these leads, left, center and right as such. Now, hold the trackball circuit board so that the side soldered to is facing you and the big plug-like thing is on the bottom of the board. Find where the detector is soldered to the trackball circuit board. Solder the mouse leads in the following way. The left mouse lead will go on the left-most lead of the detector on the trackball board. The center mouse lead will go on the right-most lead on the detector on the trackball board. Finally, the right mouse lead will be connected to the lead just to the left of where the center mouse lead is connected to. Follow these same directions for the second axis and you're almost ready to roll. Get it...roll...hahahaha...you roll the mouse...anyway...

Now all you have to do is connect your 5 volts and ground to the trackball and you're all set. You can do this one of two ways. The first way is to take the 5 volts right from the mouse. It's more soldering, slightly more difficult and may require the assistance of a multi-meter, but usually works out a little cleaner. The other way is taking 5 volts right from your PC power supply. It's very easy, but can be messy. Of course, the red and black wires going into the trackball are where you should connect your 5 volts and ground respectively. If you chose to take your power from the power supply, be a little careful. Not that the yellow wires are 12 volts and the red are 5 volts. Only power the trackball with 5 volts, NOT 12 volts. Also make sure your power supply is turned off. I will NOT be held responsible for singed hair or crispy fingers. Now plug your mouse into the computer and you're good to go. You may find some solder joints came undone or aren't connected properly. If this is the case, your trackball will not work so go fix it! And have some fun!!

2004-02-05T17:04:00.000-05:00

The other day I had to but a few supplies to get things started. Whenever I build a new arcade I always start with the control panel. That way if you never finish, at least you have a slick control panel with joysticks and trackballs and tons and tons of buttons! Here's a list of the items I purchased. I purchase all of my arcade controls from a company called Happ Controls. They actually are the ones that supply the joysticks and trackballs to the arcade companies. So I go straight to the source. Sometimes, they'll have deals you just can't pas up!

1 3" Trackball Assembly
1 3" Trackball mounting Kit
2 Ultimate Joysticks
4 Multi-player Buttons
18 Push Buttons of various colors

Once I got these in the mail (they mail stuff out to you the next day. You get it in no time!) My next step was to start hacking my mouse and hooking up the trackball to work on my PC. I don't waste money on expensive interfaces, (Happ sells a trackball interface for a PC, but its like $70) instead, I buy a $4 mouse, take it apart, and hook the trackball up to that. Ill explain that next time.

2004-02-01T21:29:00.000-05:00

I guess you've heard I'm building a new arcade. I'm not talking you're little X-Arcade joystick here. I'm talking full, 6 feet tall, 4-player joystickin', trackball rollin', coin droppin' they're at the bowling alley arcade. If you want to see how things are going, read on my friend! Read on!