I started gathering some of the stuff I'll need for my arcade machine. I don't think I'll be able to get around to actually building the cabinet until the basement gets closer to being done. So instead, I decided to start ordering the supplies I'll need so that I can play around with some of it before the final assembly.
First off, I needed to decide on how to decode the arcade buttons to emulate keyboard strokes. From researching the many examples on BYOC, I decided that the best keyboard encoder for me would be the I-Pac from Ultimarc. So that was the first thing I ordered. Since it had to come all the way from the UK, I thought I'd better do this first. I also order some arcade buttons, and a couple of joysticks from Happ Controls.
I wasn't exactly sure how I wanted the control panel to turn out, but since most of the initial hardware was so inexpensive, I just ordered a bunch of different colors. Once it all arrived, I couldn't resist wiring a few things up.
Using some crimp-style, solderless connectors, I wired up an 8-way Ultimate joystick, two buttons for playing, an insert coin button, and a player one start button. Basically, there is a common input on each micro-switch that you daisy-chain together and then wire to the ground input on the I-Pac. Next, each individual control gets their own wire directly to connected to the appropriately labeled I-Pac input. For instance, inputs on the I-Pac are labeled "player1 up", "player1 button1", and so forth. All of this is configurable, but for now I left everything at it's default setting.
This was all just a prototype anyway, but it seems that this combination of controls will work for about 90% of the games supported by the MAME emulator. After wiring everything together, and plugging the keyboard and PC into the I-Pac I was off gaming with all those 80's classics. ...and it all worked on my first try!
I also bought some T-Molding, and a slot-cutting router bit for installing it. I also decided to order more solderless connectors online. I used up almost all of the ones I bought from Radio Shack - and pretty much cleaned out their entire stock! So, instead of $1.50 for 8 connectors at Radio Shack, I ordered 100 connectors for $5.00 from allelectronics.com. That seems like a fair price, even with the $6.00 for shipping. And besides, Radio Shack always seems to irritate me. Why do they always have to ask for your phone number and zip-code, when all you want to do is pay for you $1.50 item and get outta there?
