It's time to actually face the problem...

I'm so excited about getting this arcade today. But then I was in deep thought also... Now, we got to box, it's time to start working on it.

I check out the hardware part that we're gonna connect to. Prof. Michal Heidenreich gave me some ideas how to change the monitor. And he suggests me to change all those screws also. Yeah.. those doesn't cost much, few dollars, i think. They're all rusted now and I would love to have some shiny screws in there. We were still thinking if we should use the original arcade monitor or to use a PC monitor. After I looked at the cabinet, I think it's easier to change the hardware instead of put an extra video card and configure a lower resolution, frequency monitor. And I've seen soem emulator has a function to make PC mointor look blur, make it looks like an arcade mointor.

Then next part is controller... 22 wires... sigh.. because it has 2 set of controllers, each set include 6 buttons, 4 way joy stick(means 4 switches/buttons) and one start button. So, it's 22 buttons in total. I was thinking to use game port, cos it's the usual way. But 22 wires... wow... So, the solution should be either using paralell port or solder wire into a keyboard. But if you have a look of those big desktop keyboard button soldering seems quite hard. Maybe some 10,20 years old key board uses lower end technology, which has a bigger switch and would be able to do soldiering. It's the best way to do, since all we have to do is taking care hardware part. And most emulation already support keyboard key mapping. And there are 3 wires for the coin box also. Looks like we'll go for keyboard for sure.

And the least thing is the speaker, I'm not sure how arcade sound system works. I assume it's analogue signal. Dose it needs a amplifier? And we're thinking to have ear phone jack on the arcade box some where to reduce the arcade noise in the lab. It could be easier to do with an computer speaker since some cheap $20 speakers support earphone output and sounds are amazing!

But of course, here are some good news... We may able to get a designer to handle the art work.. great! I was thinking to do the art work myself, haha.. good, so we can concentrate on the machine.

But anyway, time seems to be limited. One month before final exam, then it's holiday, and next semester will be more intense. I would like to work harder on the arcade project and leave less work for next semester. And I'm planning to write a little open source iPhone interactive game during semester break.

Hope we can make this arcade box running successfully. ^^