Plans were create by Daniel, based off of some pictures from this guy's post. He did do some alterations, but exactly what I can't tell you as I am not the woodworker fool. Anyhoo, once the pieces were cut out, they were wrapped in a shelf paper type vinyl from Home Depot, and screwed together. In retrospect we should have filled the screw holes in with putty and sanded it so everything was nice and smooth, but instead we covered the holes with circular vinyl pieces, which does not look bad at all.
Once we got that together, we put together the control panel, which wasn't as hard as we had originally thought. Just some hole drilling and some wire daisy chaining and we were in business. We decided to go with 4 buttons per player due to space limitations (this thing IS a mini cab), with a 1 and 2 player button, and a coin insert button on the two sides.
This is when things started to slow down a little bit as we got to the more complicated stuff. Luckily I ordered some screw mounts from Ultimarc, the company that sells the joysticks, buttons and PC interface for them. We were able to screw these directly into the bottom base of Superbox, ensuring that the mobo would not move around. it was all going fine and dandy until we realized a small design flaw -
THE MONITOR WOULD NOT FIT!!!!
There was nowhere for the monitor to sit without crushing the motherboard and there was really no where else to put the monitor. So after a few F Bombs and some quiet sobbing in the corner (AND a quick trip to the hardware store) Daniel had the wildly wonderful idea to hang the damn monitor upside down like a bat.
Thanks to a windows (or nvidia) feature to display at 180 degrees, this caused very little headache and we were back in business. The hard drive was mounted to the back of the wood holding the monitor, and Superbox was functional, but not yet finished!
The rest of the work was mainly cosmetic and I will list it briefly here. We got a small 12 inch florescent light to go behind the marquee. The marquee was printed at kinkos (where I used to work) but it took a few times to get a good backlit printout with a good lamination. That is attached to a piece of plastic, that's wedged into the top, lined with vinyl.
We ordered 2 small (but surprisingly powerful) HP speakers from best buy and just velcro'ed them to the top sides with industrial strength velcro, complete with a small headphone volume adjuster wheel. We left a good part of the back top open for speaker sound and for ventilation. The bottom of the door has a small cutout where we put the small USB panel that used to be in the front of the Dell computer this thing used to be, so you could easily plug in and USB device or headphones easily.
The monitor was covered with a piece of plexiglass screwed into a wood frame and covered with, you guessed it, vinyl! We spliced the original power button (as it wasn't practical in this box) and wired to a nice big red button that is sticking out of the bottom left side of the machine.
I apologize if this all seems rushed through, I am typing this out in one sitting trying to remember how we went about things. I realize I have not even touched on the software side, but for now just understand that this thing is 100 percent controllable from only the buttons that are there. Below are some pictures and expect a follow up post at some point with everything that I missed! Thanks for reading!
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