I'm Back.

The last time I updated this blog was quite some time ago. I never did finish off my bartop machine due mainly to financial reasons, but now things are a little better so I've decided now is the time to get it done. Since my last post things in my life have changed quite dramatically, and for some time I didn't really play any games at all, but I always seem to come back to them at some point. I'm currently listening to several gaming Podcasts, including the excellent 'Atari 2600 Game by Game' (I recently picked up my first 2600 carts whilst in Newcastle and hope to purchase a machine to play them on very soon). I've also set up my NES, GameCube and PS2 in the living room, so it's safe to say I'm definitely in gaming mode at the moment.

Stay tuned to see how I finish off my Bartop machine over the coming months!

Modded PSU and Completed Backdoor

Luckily my Dad is an electrician and has been able to help me with this project in all sorts of ways. One of my main concerns was how to supply power to the whole setup at the touch of one button. I'd seen online that many people were using Smart Strips but it seems in the UK many people have had problems getting them to work properly. There are also ways of modding a power strip, but as it's such a small cabinet, there really isn't enough space to hold one without it looking a mess. So my Dad's suggestion was to do away with the power strip altogether and instead just wire in a relay (we used a 10A DPDT 12v Miniature Relay). In effect what this does is when the power button to boot the PC is pressed, this makes a connection in the relay and allows the other devices (marque light, amp for the speakers and the monitor) to all be able to switch on at the same time. Here you can see the relay which is connected to the power supply:

Although we are using the power button found on the front of most PC towers to switch on the whole system, there is also a master power switch for the PSU which we decided to mount on the back door so that the power may be turned off completely from the unit. Along with this we also mounted the socket from the PSU for the plug onto the back door:

Because there was exposed circuitry on the inside of the cabinet from the PSU socket, we covered this with a plastic cap:

Next we added the fan for the backdoor and also a knob for opening it:

And here it is so far, with the computer fully shelled and running Hyperspin:

Mounting the Monitor, Motherboard and PSU

Now that most of the painting is complete (leaving the final coat for the side panels until nearer the end, so they don't get too scuffed), we mounted the monitor into the cabinet. The Dell monitor I'm using has a handy detachable bracket that we've placed onto the horizontal wooden monitor panel; this way, the monitor can be easily taken out of the cabinet if I so wish in the future (or at least while we construct it).

Then we arranged the motherboard and psu into the base of the cabinet and raised it up off base panel using a couple of thin pieces of wood. Sandwiched between the strip of wood and motherboard / psu, we used some heavy duty felt pads, these should hopefully help to dampen the vibrations from the on board fans (I suspect without these the wood would only amplify the vibrations).

The next jobs to do include; mounting the hard-drive, attaching brackets for the perspex monitor cover (with bezel), choosing an amp and speakers, fitting the mains socket into the back door along with a master power switch and the back door fan - all of which I'll cover in my next post. Here's the build so far:

Routing The Edges For T-Molding

Construction has slowed a little somewhat over the last week as I've been mainly just applying coats of paint and working on completing my Hyperspin setup. However, we did manage to get the routing done around the edging of the side panels for the t-molding. Neither me nor my Dad owns a router and so my girlfriends Granddad was kind enough to lend me his, unfortunately the bit needed for cutting the slot for the t-molding is very difficult to source in the UK and so I had to order it from Groovy Game Gear in the US; which arrived in exactly a week.

The cutter is designed for cutting a slot that is 1/16", the part of the t-molding that is pressed into the slot is 3/32" which allows the 'teeth' of the molding to bite into the slight narrower slot that we cut.

Once the blade was aligned with the very centre of the wood, the actual cutting was very easy, (be sure to wear safety goggles and a mask as this thing produces SO much fine sawdust) but make sure you're not running the router over your final coat of paint at it will leave marks. When we'd finished cutting we pressed a little of the t-molding into the slot and it sat in perfectly; looking forward to when the final coats of paint are applied so we can put it all on!

Further Construction And Painting

Following on from the cutting we started with the assembly of the cabinet. To attach the pieces we used plastic brackets and a couple of plastic angled brackets; I contemplated using wood glue also but I'm reluctant to do so as I may wish to take the cabinet apart at some point in the future and I'm confident it'll be strong enough once the assembly is complete. First we measured out all the holes to drill and then we attached the brackets:

Once these parts were put into the cabinet we added two strips of plastic to act as supports for the ends of the control panel:

Really pleased with the way the cabinet is looking now, because I was pretty organised going into this, so far the build doesn't seem to be too difficult at all. The next step is to begin the painting which, I've decided, will require two coats of white primer to begin. When working with MDF the most important thing when it comes to painting is making sure that the surface is sealed correctly. Many primers are water based and these should be AVOIDED at all cost when it comes to priming the surface, as water based will raise the fibres in the wood. The primer I've chosen is 'satin based' and is called 'grey steel' which is slightly off-white and perfect for the colour I'll be applying over it.

The rollers are just cheap ones I picked up from The Range which are ideal for use on smooth surfaces.

 

Before I started the painting I quickly sanded over the surface with sandpaper (I used the 'extra fine' for all of the coats apart from the final coat, for which I will use the 'super fine'), this should ALWAYS be done before ANY coat of paint is applied; I then wiped it down with a damp cloth to remove any dust.

Water-based painted tends to dry much faster than the satin based paint I'm using, and as such it's been taking roughly 24 hours for a coat to completely dry even in the warmth of the house rather than the cold garage where the work is taking place.

A couple of days later and the undercoats are finished and the surface is looking really nice. So again I use the sandpaper (extra fine) and apply my first coat of coloured paint using another roller. The colour scheme and artwork is based on the original 1981 Nintendo of America cabinet for Donkey Kong so I choose 'Warm Blue' from the 'Colours' range from B&Q. A cabinet this size won't require too much paint but at least 3 coats will be required, so instead of buying a large tin for £18 I bought small 'match pot' tubs for £1.10 each, of which I may only need to use 3 or 4.

For the back door and the insides of the cabinet I am using black; I've yet to decide on whether to paint the entire interior black or just the part that will be visible next to the bezel and control panel on the inside of the side-panels.

So now the first blue and black coats are on and drying... looking good so far...

Manuals Viewer For Hyperspin

As the cabinet I'm building is focused solely on arcade gaming, I thought it would be nice to have an archive of manuals and artwork that would be able to be viewed by launching into a seperate viewer from the Hyperspin menus. It took me a while to figure out how best to do this; I started with the manuals first. The program I've decided to use to view the manuals is ComicRack (a program I was already familiar with due to my love of comics) with the addition of Ghost Script which enables ComicRack to display .pdf files. ComicRack is definitely the best comic reader software out there for many reasons. The first is that it is pretty customisable and the layout of the program interface can be changed around to suit. Secondly, the actual viewer is very slick and just looks and feels really nice. Thirdly, it has a library which has some very useful features suited for what I'm trying to do alongside Hyperspin.

So first I put a bunch of manuals in the ComicRack folder which installed in the emulators folder in Hyperspin. Then in HyperHQ I configured a new item on the main wheel called Manuals which I set to contain a sub-wheel. On the subwheel I wanted to have each letter of the alphabet to make the viewing of the manuals much easier as there will be quite a lot of them. To do this I went into databases folder in Hyperspin and located the, newly created, 'manuals' folder. In here I created a manuals.xml and started to apply the following code:

<menu>

<game name="0-9">

<description>#0-9 Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

<game name="A">

<description>A Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

<game name="B">

<description>B Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

<game name="C">

<description>C Manuals</description>

<cloneof></cloneof>

<manufacturer>Press F11 & F3 for full screen.</manufacturer>

<year></year>

<genre></genre>

</game>

</menu>

This code will give me the letters A,B and C on the wheel plus a 0-9 title for Manuals beginning with a number.

So now I have my alphabet set-up I want ComicRack to launch and display the specified Manuals. To do this I added the folder containing the manuals into the library in ComicRack and then created individual reading lists for each letter of the alphabet. To do this, right-click in the sidebar and select 'New List' and name it accordingly. Then highlight all of the files you wish to put in that list, right-click, and then 'add to list' and choose the desired reading list.

Next, in the sidebar right click on a reading list and select 'export reading list' and save the '.cbl' file in the same folder as the manuals within ComicRack. This .cbl file is what we'll use within Hyperspin to launch the reading list that corresponds to our wheel. When naming the .cbl file in ComicRack, make sure that it matches the assigned letter that we put in the manuals.xml file; e.g. <game name="A"> the corresponding file should be named A.cbl.

Now all that is left to do is to configure the wheel in HyperHQ. Set 'execution' to normal instead of HyperLaunch, then put in the .exe path for ComicRack. Next set the path for the folder of where the manuals are located, enable 'full path to roms' and also 'search subfolders' and finally in the 'extensions' box type cbl.

And there it is, a fully functioning archive and a great resource to just peruse, all that's left to do is to create a custom theme and wheel art. Using pretty much the same method but with some slight changes I'll be adding a viewer for cabinet artwork next.

Cabinet Construction Day 1

It's been a week since my last post and there's been quite a bit of progress to report. It turns out the PC I originally intended to use isn't up to running Hyperspin but luckily I have a spare machine which is faster. So I connected up the hard drive and it performs much better:

Asus A7V400-MX motherboard

AMD Athlon XP 2600+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.9GHz

1gb Ram

80gb Western Digital Hard Drive

So now I have both Mame0.147 with the Hiscore DIFF and Daphne up and running within Hyperspin. I've also added all of the EmuMovies for Hyperspin which looks fantastic. The more I use Hyperspin and get to know it, the more I realise just how powerful the software is; it can be a little tough getting started with it as there's so much to learn (if you're looking to customise it especially) but all the hard work really pays off in the end. I have some new things I'll be adding to Hyperspin too but more on that in the next post.

Earlier last week I took a trip down to B&Q and purchased the MDF for the cabinet construction. Typically bartop machines are built using ½" MDF (as opposed to ¾" MDF used for most upright cabinets) so I picked out the MDF Board (L)2440 x (W)1220 x (T)12MM.

Onto this (following my plans) I drew the first side panel in pencil. For the big curved line I used a piece of string around the pencil to draw an arc. 

Next the first side panel was cut with a jigsaw.

Using the cut out side panel as a template the second panel was drawn and cut out  Following this the rest of the parts were similarly drawn and cut out. All the other parts of the cabinet have straight edges, so to cut these we used a circular saw to get a straighter edge. When cutting out these parts it's best to draw one and then cut it rather than draw them all out at once and then cutting them. This is because when a cut is made a couple of mm (at least) will be lost due to the thickness of the blade and so the measurements will be off.

Next I did a little bit of sanding (with sandpaper rather than an electric sander) to the edging of the side panels. This is just to make the edges smoother but as I'll hopefully be applying T-Molding it isn't too important that this be perfect. Then I just did a quick once over with some rough sandpaper on the parts where paint will be applied as this will help the paint take to the wood better.

Now the cabinet is really starting to take shape!