Space Duel is up... Two Tigers is on deck!

Before thanksgiving, I received prototype #2 of the metal control panel and after a quick test fit on the cabinet, I began the arduous process of installing the controls and wiring them to the GP-Wiz interface. After an hour or so of wire stripping and cutting I was done. The wiring job didn't look pretty, but everything was connected. **I will post before and after photos of my wiring cleanup later**

I attached it to the cab and voila! It was perfect! Everything fit and was arranged where it was supposed to.

That's quite a few controls squeezed into 24"

I also printed out a temporary marquee using the graphic that I had designed on some glossy Kodak photo paper that I had sitting around. (I got tired of the marquee light shining in my eyes) There are two seams that you can see, but it looks good for a temporary fix till I order the Marquee and Control Panel Overlay from mamemarquees.com.

not bad for plain 'ol photo paper, huh?

I was having some problems with the monitor a while ago... the red was flickering out and back. I was afraid that I damaged something when I took the monitor out of the case, but after some detective work, I found that it was just a bad monitor cable. Gotta love nice, easy fixes! :)

I still have some tweaking to do to narrow down the lists of games, get screenshots working for the n64, genesis, nes, and snes games, as well as other software tweaks. Although there are a few little things to do, the machine is up and running and is already a hit at parties.

Space Arcade up and running... but wait! who is his friend?

So now that the fun stuff is finished, its time to start another project, right? You bet! My wife's uncle, who manufactured the metal control panel, told me that he would be interested in having an arcade cabinet of his own. So off to the forums and classifieds I went to find myself a new cab. I have casually been looking for the past month or so, and last week I wondered onto the buy/sell/trade forums at Build Your Own Arcade Controls and found a cabinet within an hour of my house being offered for free! I jumped on the deal and picked it up this weekend. It was originally a Two Tigers game that was converted into a P-47: Phantom Fighter. The cabinet is in great condition, and with a little love and elbow grease, it should make a fine MAME Cabinet.

This project will only move as fast as I get money from Jeff to work on it, so I don't know how long it will take to finish, but regardless, it should look pretty awesome when it's done.

Questions? comments? suggestions? drop me an email!

Be back soon with another update...