Video Game Collecting

Well, I had planned this for almost a year and I finally took action on it today.  My father in law and I built this iCade 60 in 1 arcade machine almost two years ago.  At the time it was going to be a mame machine with a simple computer in it.  Then at Jammaboards.Com I found that iCade 60 in 1 motherboard for cheap and bought that instead.

Since the Mame project was scrapped it was too late to remove the extra controller and 9 buttons.  So I asked my father in law to forge on with a decision to update the control panel some other time.  Well today was ‘some other time’.

The first thing I had to do was remove the old one.  This wasn’t too difficult.  Simply removed two screws on either side that was holding the control panel in place then chisel the edges to break the wood glue and it broke away cleanly.  I noticed the wood under the control panel was in terrible shape.  We had done our best to patch the left side with the intention of sanding and painting it fresh, but in my haste it never happened.

One of the hazards of having the control panel screwed and and glued down was the difficulty in wiring the buttons and joysticks.  At the time this was almost  a four hour project since i had to blindly reach into the cabinet and basically wire everything by touch.  Now this is no longer the problem.  The control panel will be mounted with hinges and a locking system to make the accessibility of the buttons easier.  This photo shows the mess of wires that connects the control panel to the JAMMA hardness to the mobo which is mounted to the subwoofer of the computer speakers.  That black thing center top is the power supply which is an ATX computer powersupply with two of the wires grounded which keeps the unit running.

And finally this is what the control panel looks like.  All of the games are single player or two players alternating so only one controller is necessary.  Only one game is configured to use all three buttons and thats Gun.Smoke.  The wood is poplar.  It smells nice and looks beautiful.