Bitter Pie
Friday 30 April 2004, 20:29 WST —
Look at the pretty graph! Well actually, it’s not so pretty. The large yellow section you can see is my leisure, or “going out” expenses as I call them. The money I spend for a good night out with friends, buying drinks, entry into clubs, etc. As you can see, it’s very large.
That is not a good thing.
So I’m really trying to get my expenses under control, which means that I’m going to be cutting back on the partying. Yes, I have written this many times before, but this time I’m going to do it! (How many smokers have always said that before they failed to quit smoking?). With a bit of luck the May graph will be much better.
More broken bikes…
Sunday 18 April 2004, 18:06 WST —
Recently went over to a good twat’s, er, I mean mate’s house for a visit. Aside from getting a bit drunk and spending the night listening to cool tunes, I also go pictures of his ex-CBR 900. Enjoy.
Webpage update yet again
Saturday 17 April 2004, 12:53 WST —
That’s right. I’m fiddling with the web page again. This time I’ve moved it over to MovableType which is actually kinda funky. I still have to figure out how to get some stuff moving smoothly, but so far it hasn’t been a headache. Which is kinda amazing for computer stuff
A plan, a plan, my kingdom for a plan
Saturday 17 April 2004, 12:45 WST —
Quick update, here’s a little bit of the plan. It’s not right yet, but I’m working on it.
If you’re after a PDF of my current draft, you can find it here. There’s a few mistakes on it, and I really want to get a slight angle on the control panel. But that’s the general gist of it. Measurements are all metric, because that’s what we use here…
In the beginning
Saturday 17 April 2004, 12:37 WST —
I’ve been wanting to make an arcade cabinet for some time, basically because there is no better way to play arcade games, except on an arcade cabinet.
So I’ve decided to go about making one, pretty much just like every other person who’s done it, I’m going to keep track of my progress on my web site. Unfortunately, I don’t have very much spare cash lying around, and to top that off I’m also fairly lazy. So progress is going to be VERY slow.
At the moment, I’m in the planning stage, need to figure out what I want from an arcade cabinet. I’m a fan of the Street Fighter games, although I’ve never been, really, really, serious about it (I’ve never felt the need to spend 3 hours a day trying to perfect combos, et al), I do like the design of the typical Street Fighter cabinet. Luckly for me, somebody who came in fairly often to where I work (Direct Communications, Australia’s No. 1 Tait dealer) has just bought a 4 player Street Fighter cabinet. I’m not exactly why it’s a 4 player cabinet, however it’s of the design that I like, and when it arrives I’ll be able to take some measurements of it for my own.
Ok, so my goal is for a 4 player cabinet, that I can also use for Street Fighter. So I’m guessing what I’ll need will be two player spots in the prime position with the full 6 buttons with the other 2 players either side with only about 3 or 4 buttons. So, the parts I’ll need here are:
- 4 Joysticks
- 20 Player buttons
- 4 Player start buttons
I’m looking at the Happ Control 8-way Ultimate Joystick it comes in 5 different colours (which means I can have a different colour for each player) and seems like a pretty good choice. It’s really hard to tell how good one joystick is over another, check out the Happ Controls Joystick page for an idea of the selection available.
Also, I want the joystick panel/assembly to be modular, so I can remove it and change it with another set of controls to suit different games (like Ikari warriors, and Heavy Barrel for example). I got this idea off reading someone elses MAME cabinet site (which I can’t actually find anymore, if I happen to find it I’ll link to his site). This will take a bit more effort to plan, but it’s better in the long run.
I’ve got a few options on how to interface these with the computer, by far the best option seems to be the I-PAC4 Board. This nifty bit of gear plugs into the keyboard port of the computer (so no driver hassles, although it does support USB as well), and has enough inputs on it to support 4 joysticks with 8 buttons each, as well as the extra buttons (coin 1, 2, etc). And apparently there’ll be no keyboard matrix issues (which means that if everyone is using all the joysticks and buttons at the same time no buttons go dead.
Also, the same company makes a video card for interfacing 15kHz monitors (the one’s arcade machines use) to the PC with no other modifications necessary. This is going to be essential, because I want to put the biggest monitor that I can into the cabinet (hopefully 27inch or more) and trying to get a computer monitor that size, will be, well, expensive. However a 27inch 60Hz TV, or arcade monitor, I know I can get them fairly cheap. Luckly for me I also happen to work across the road from an arcade repair shop.
Thank god for Google
Friday 02 April 2004, 20:24 WST —
Whoops, never do any webpage editing while drunk. Thanks to some tomfoolery with CityDesk I accidently deleted my main template for my site. Which of course removed all my pages, whoops. Luckly however, I did a search on Google for my web site, then accessed it’s cache of my webpage. I got my website template back in 5 minutes.
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