The arcade controller came out very nicely if I do say so myself. After my post in November it took about 2 weeks to put it all together but not without some anguish. The first problem I came across was from the aspen(?) board I chose for the top panel. After deciding on the button and joystick layout, I started drilling and happened to tear out a huge chunk of board between two buttons. Since those two buttons were the FIRST two buttons I drilled, I assumed the wood was too soft and not up to the challenge of being an arcade panel.
The next board was MDF, a glued, compressed saw dust type board. This worked perfectly. All the holes were drilled out, I routed out the underside of the panel, I cut the side boards to size, screwed them all together. Then Ta-Da I had a wooden box with a lot of holes in it.
After that came painting, I sprayed two layers of gray primer then 3 layers of black glossy. The black didn't come out the way I wanted it to, so I hand painted a heavy layer of clear coat. That result was far more appealing!
The next to last step was adding all the buttons and joysticks. One or two joysticks needed a few spacers for leveling but that was real easy. (This is the prettiest picture)
And LASTLY, I hard soldered all the wires to the buttons and connected them to the control board. I didn't get good results with the quick disconnects I had used on the earlier test model.
Also, at some point during a clean up day, I threw out the wire that connected the control board to the computer. It was a very weird male PS/2 plug(that mice and keyboards are connected with) to a male USB wire. So since I didn't have the time to have a new wire shipped to me I had to make my own. After a good deal of research and stripping wires down, I ended up with the wire below. Thankfully it worked!
And that's everything for the arcade controller. I had friends over and it works great!
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