What a difference in the wiring job, unbelievable!  I think I'm going to print out a before/after pics of the wiring job with a "not ok" and "ok" underneath each!  Considering how many buttons there are to connect/interconnect, I was certainly expecting something controlled, but a lot more all over the place.  Well done!

Monkeybug: that's a pretty clean looking CP.  It's basic but if one will only play two button games, that's all you need, I wouldn't want it any different either.

Man, that's a big project Sparky!  Looks good!

FINISH IT!!!!

...FLAWLESS VICTORY!

It is done. Just finished testing, it is 100%. I just missed 1 wire which was corrected right away.

Delivery today, 1pm.

Surely pics to be available then.

Looking forward to it, thanks again for everything Ian, safe ride in.

I've got almost all roms for other emulators setup, will need to configure some of them.  Unfortunately, didn't have the time this week to mess around with Mala.  Also, my new Mame PC (1.6ghz) seems to have lousy on-board audio, I'll have to see if I have a sound card hanging around and install it in, see if it helps.

Yay!  I got the cab delivered and it's great.  Attention to detail is right out there and I'm glad to say even though it's a busy panel, everything is accessible and nothing seems to get in the way at all.  For a fan of emulation, it's a god send.

Still have a few things to configure, can't wait to try the pinball stuff so I'll load VP pronto (or I'll try the other pc in it).

Ian's a cool guy, a darn good drummer at Rock Band too .  Thanks Ian, appreciated.  My wife and I spoke after you left and she said "Wow!  It's very nice". That's pretty high praise, when I usually say "dear, come look at this", I usually get the "it's nice" ... as she's walking away eheh.

I'll post pics later tonight.

First time I ever played too! Got me hooked...

Thanks for the compliments... I hope you enjoy it!

What a last couple of days this has been.  Finally got a chance to try it out yesterday, starting reconfiguring some of the buttons as they conflicted with the older IPAC settings.  To make it worse, the IPAC kept timing out when trying to program it.

But fear not, I was successful.  I got a chance to play Tempest (Spinner works fine on my new CAB winxp PC Sparky).  It's fun playing it as it was intended, with a spinner.  I also tried Visual Pinball and yeah, it's even more fun playing it with the flipper buttons.   Had a heck of a time remapping buttons though, one of the flippers was set to a key I couldn't remap in Visual Pinball, so I had to remap through the IPAC to a different key, which meant I had to remap Mame away from it's default. No problemo, that's why the option is there .

More testing, cleaning it up and then I'll have my kids take a pic of ME and my toy .

Alrighty, a couple of little upgrades:

- I decided to increase the slope of the monitor.  As it's an LCD, it's very important it's as perpendicular (sp?)as possible to my eyes.  At the present slope, I could see there was missing detail when viewing the top of the screen.  A bit of wood here, a couple of screws there and now it's perfect.  Big Bonus, if I use the bar stool to sit at the cab, it's STILL perfect!

- I'm not much for hacking, especially anything electrical.  But as it is, I managed to read up on the little light, molex connectors, on PC power supply voltage and on how to connect it using the little crimpers (whatever they're called) to the little light that came with the illuminated trackball.  Take a look at the attached pics for the result .

Unfortunately, I can confirm my new PC will not fit in the cab, both by height and by depth.  Anyone have a cheap small form PC case that can take a P4B motherboard?

Little story:  when I went to a computer store to get info on making an adapter (like I said, I don't know anything about this stuff), they told me for PC power supplys:  red is 12v and yellow is 5v.  Thank you wikipedia for existing so that I could confirm that was incorrect info!!!  Jury rigged my little adapter (don't worry Sparky, it's safe ... I think!) and everything worked.  So far, no smoke...

A couple of new upgrades, no pics required.

- I recently did get a new plexiglass to protect the monitor, one with less tint to it (and a spare clear one in case the tinted version was still too dark).  Turns out the tinted version is perfect.  When playing you don't really see around the monitor, yet it still allows light to go through enough that I don't have to turn the brightness completely up on the monitor, which in turn should extend the life of my LCD monitor (hopefully).

- I finally received my IPAC2 replacement board from Ultimarc (England I think).  $12 and that's with free shipping, which took a little over 3 weeks.  Very reasonable me thinks.  So I plugged her in and... IT WORKED!  No more stuck key, which means I can now use the IPAC2's ability to have a secondary input for ALL buttons, which does away with the need for a keyboard.   I’ll keep one around for admin reasons of course .

Right on! The plexi I got isn't tinted at all, looks great though. Was it that place on Lisgar you got it from? How much was it? And yes, RED is 5V, YELLOW is 12V. Who knows why?

Yep, I paid I think was $11 for the tinted plexi and yes, it's the store on Lisgar near bank. They charge by square foot I think, mine's a minicab so not too expensive?

Confession time... I was the original "designer" of this MAME. Looking back at that wiring... wow. The "sparkification" process is amazing. Sorry for causing you all those headaches loafer!

I can post some building pics for history sake later, if anybody is interested.