Aught Cade

Control panels are probably the most important component of a well designed cabinet. The control panel that came with the Taito Egret 29 cabinet was decent sized, but had a very small control zone that barely fit two joysticks and 6 buttons.
It had to go.

I identified 5 key issues that the new control panel must resolve to be worth building.

• The knees of the primary player, a 250lb, 6'3" white male, do not easily fit
• The screen is too big and too close for full screen motion (racing games)
• Too low to sit at and play with proper posture ;) (thanks mom)
• Lacked controls to play many of the MAME supported games
• Larger controls are too tall for the control panel

• Raise the bottom of the control panel by 3 inches
• Increase the interior clearance to a consistent 4 inches
• Raise the top of the control panel by 7 inches
• Set the player 1 and player 2 positions at an angle to give more shoulder room
• Must hold, 2 rotary and 2 8-way joysticks, trackball, command buttons, and 1 4-way joystick
• LCD to show what the controls are for each game
• Big, easy to reach command controls

The cabinet is made out of solid steel and the control panel is made of plastic which makes the idea of building a wood control panel a little strange. I decided early on that it would have to be made of metal or plastic to maintain continuity of the design. I wanted a lot of controls on the one panel so that I could play any of the games, to a reasonable degree, that MAME supports. I felt OK about limiting the number of players to two and also about leaving off the spinner initially; using the trackball in it's place. I definitely wanted to have rotary joysticks as some of my most favorite games use rotary joysticks.

I started out using Visio to map out in 1:1 scale how the buttons and joystick would be spaced for one player, then I added masks for the trackball, and rotary joysticks. I place them out on a piece of plywood and started sculpting a control panel. I calculated the angles that I had drawn on the plywood and added them to the visio drawing. Click the picture at right to see a better view of the original design. You can click on vsd to get the source Visio file though it is outdated by the files below.

I needed to have a full size plot of the design to have it built so I exported the Visio document to Autocad dwg/dxf, and took it to Aaron at Perfect Image. Aaron is the Manager of CAD Services and personally cleaned up and plotted my design in just a few minutes. It was incredible. I had been printing out and taping 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper together to get the real world prototype. Now I had a complete, perfectly aligned, picture of what I needed. If you are in the Seattle/Kirkland area I highly recommend talking to a company like Perfect Image. He was exceptional about working with some less than perfect files and even gave me a reference to a laser cutting shop. It really helps the design and manufacturing process to have a real plot to talk over. I traced the plot onto a piece of plywood and started cutting. The prototype told me right away that I need more space between the buttons and the front edge of the control panel to allow the players to rest their hands. It was an easy mistake to make when you don't have the design physically in front of you. I made adjustments and updated the visio diagram.

After updating the visio diagram I realized that I would once again have to export the visio and make fixes to the resulting files. Instead of repeating this over and over I decided to use a modeling program and make the changes on my own. There is a great, easy to use, albeit expensive, application called Rhinoceros that I happened to own an older version of. A demo of Rhino is available that will allow you to save up to 25 times and otherwise remain functional. Look for it in the download section. I broke out the tutorials and started learning how to model. After just a few hours I was able to render my design in 3D.

I went through several revisions, and ended up adding a volume control, a series of control buttons and an LCD screen. To get better visibility of the LCD I modeled a 45 degree faced console to the top of the control panel. With the new height of the control panel and adjusted seating, 45 degrees is directly pointing at a player sitting at the controls. I haven't yet modeled the controls that will be mounted on the LCD console. There will be buttons for scrolling, turning the back light on and off, and an OK and cancel button. Modifications to ArcadeOS and Mame will have to occur to support those buttons. Otherwise I will have to build a hardware level cache and let ArcadeOS send all of the information and ration it out to the LCD in response to the button presses. I envision a WML type language for the scripting. A group of ArcadeOS fans are getting ready to continue development as ArcadeOS creator, Brian Lewis, moves on. You can visit the development site, hosted here at Significant Bits.