The next phase of the project was the control panel. Although much smaller than the cabinet itself, this part took probably longer :). The first part to be constructed was the base, which turned out to be very easy. The base, as well as the cabinet, were sanded and then finished with Minwax Polyshades - Honey Pine Satin. To hide the edges of the plywood, veneer stripping was used. This was also used on the cabinet, except that in some places, the stripping was cut in half down the center.
I originally intended to mount the top of the control panel to the base with velcro, but I ended up scraping that idea. Instead, the top of the control panel is attached via magnets. It works pretty well and allows for easy access to the underside of the control panel.
With a clear design layed out, I proceeded with tracing out where the joysticks, buttons, and trackball would be located. Nothing too earth shattering here. I just used your typical ruler, templates and straight edges.
Drilling the button joystick holes took some time. For this, I just used a power drill and hole saw. To avoid ripping the veneer, I started the drilling process from the veneer side and worked my way to the back. A square was cut out with a jig saw to mount the trackball.
The button colors and the layout I used can be seen on the right. The four black buttons are used as function buttons for Tab, Enter, Pause, and Esc. There are 2 coin-insert buttons, next to the Player 1 and Player 2 start buttons. The buttons I purchased can be found here.
The joysticks were also purchased from Happ Controls. These are the Super Joysticks and work fantastic! I mounted them from the "back", using wood screws, since I didn't want to drill a hole completely through the control panel. The joystick in the middle acts as a 4-way joystick. It really does make a difference for 4 way games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.
The trackball was also obtained from Happ Controls. It connects to the PC via a USB interface. The buttons to the right of it act as the three mouse buttons.
With the buttons, joysticks, and trackball in place, the last thing to do was wire everything together. This turned out to be more time consuming than anything else. It's actully quite easy. Everything, but the trackball and mouse buttons, are wired to the I-PAC encoder.
The model I have is pretty old and only supports 2 players. Since most 4-way games are only played 1 player at a time, I connected it to the 1 Player input as well - essentially, I have two different joysticks connected to the same input.
The coin door in the cabinet is also wired (not shown here) to the I-PAC encoder. This just simply connects to the inputs you would expect.
That's it! With the control panel fully wired now, the next thing to do is play!
