Summer time blues.

I've been staring and staring at the design for my arcade cabinet and trying to find a way to make it cheaper.  I've come up with a few ideas, but now I've lost my original sketchup art, and I just don't feel like making a new one.  Oh well I guess all I have to really do is make one joystick with 4 or 6 buttons and a USB cable, I don't have to build a whole cabinet at once.

Winter again!

Oh look another year went by without me buying anything for this project.  It's been in the works so long I don't even think I'll be making it this year either.

Well here we are again

Yes it's that time again, when winter is coming and I look for a new project.  It seems every year I look to make an arcade machine, and every year I rationalize why I can't.

It's almost winter

I haven't done a thing with my plans for an arcade machine, apparently I don't have enough cash flow to build anything. This is a little upsetting to say the least, I mean I've only been dreaming about this since 2002, and now that I live in the place I wanted back in 2002 I thought I could now build what I wanted from 2002. Nope, it looks like only one dream will be fulfilled this year.

News

I am moving into my new place this week, and have been packing for weeks, so there has been no new advancements on my arcade research except that I now know that the cheapest way to build this would be to build only the control panel to be attached to a big box of a monitor/TV stand at a later date. I will have to do some refinements to the design in order to accommodate this.

Well back to packing.

No Design Pics

Sorry, no design pics today, but I am giving an update on what I've learned so far. I have learned that I would love to have analog joysticks, but only if it comes in the short ball top format. I don't know if this is possible, but it would be very cool. I also learned that I could make this thing a lot easier if i concentrated on one aspect at a time. I will try to build the controls first, seperately and add them onto a big box later. That way I can make a USB connection and use my current setup. I will start with 1 player controls using a slat for a joystick, a slat for 8 buttons, and an big empty slat. The backsplash (if I can call it that) will need to have the administative buttons hard wired.

Oh, that's my girlfriend calling for me, gotta run.

Concepts for vertical rotation, front and back view. Remember you can click the image to open a larger file.