After a LONG delay, the building of Bella's Arcade and the addition of another kid to the family I've decided to rededicate myself to finishing this arcade table. It has been playable for the last year or so but there are several things I have to do before calling this thing finished. Also, since it has been a year, there are a few things I'm going to try and improve since I last worked on it like updating the games (Street Fighter III is now playable!) and front end (MaLa is by far my favorite now so GameLauncher has got to go).
Here's the unofficial "to do" list:
- Buy a new glass top. The current glass top is 1/8" thick but that was a mistake on my part. Original cocktail cabinets used 1/4" thick glass table tops so that's what I want to use. I've got to get it tempered too.
- Install the glass clips to hold the glass table top in place. Just two screws on each of the 8 clips should do the trick.
- Wire the coin door - a working coin door will be nice even though I currently use buttons for inserting credits.
- Install the opaque plexiglass above the short control panels and wire some LEDs behind them to light everything up. The old cocktail cabinets had this feature for when people played in smokey, dank bars back in the 80s and wanted to see the controls. I'll grab power to illuminate the LEDs from the 5v line on the power supply of the computer.
- Glue the grommet for the SmartStrip cord in place - this should take all of 30 seconds to do but it might be a problem clamping/holding it in place.
- Install and configure MaLa and update the romlist - this is going to be a huge pain but I've got to do it.
- Install artwork on the tabletop. It's been two years since I commissioned the artwork from a "professional" artist and after emailing back and forth a million times I've sort of given up on ever getting anything from him. I've learned my lesson - don't ever pay for anything until you have a finished piece in hand. Hopefully he will come through and do what I paid him to do or karma will bite him in the ass. If I have to do this myself I might rethink the design (and name) of the arcade table...
Whew! that's about all that's left. It's actually not that much and I don't know why I've been waiting so long to wrap this thing up. Long term on this thing I might end up remaking the control panels and swapping out some of the joysticks. There have been a lot of cool innovations in the hobby over the past few years and the 4-way/8-way joystick "problem" has been virtually eliminated through software (MaLa's controller maps) and the corresponding Ultimarc 360 joysticks. Sometime in the future I'd like to upgrade everything but for now I just want to finish what I've got in front of me...
We refinished the third floor (attic) in our house and it's now a spare bedroom but there's no furniture up there. I think this thing would fit nicely...
