> http://makezine.com/2014/10/04/10-diy-arcade-projects-that-youll-want-to-make/
>
> Or 9. Trashcade? Seriously?
Mine is one step removed from Trashcade. I omitted all of the cardboard and pretense of a cabinet and instead rebuilt a cheap, beat-to-crap used X-Arcade Tankstick with better internals.
Behold, Project "Lipstick on a Pig":
Ultimarc/IL T-Sticks - the precursor to the MagStick (these are spring-centered instead of magnet-centered). Top-switchable from 8-way to 4-way, just pull stick up and rotate a quarter-turn. I replaced the horrible stiff and loud stock Saia microswitches with Zippy's and modified the actuator levers -- this also gave the sticks a little more travel, which is a good thing as they are very short-travel. Installation required fabricating a couple of adapter plates; the T-stocks (and Mag-Sticks) use a narrow-mount pattern so I made up a couple of new joystick top-plates from .060" steel sheet using the IL/Happ standard pattern. I used some black Happ dust washers too, as the red ones were visually just a little too much on the mostly-black panel.
All of the buttons are now IL/Happ with Cherry switches, and I added a Groovy Game Gear Turbo-Twist 2 with a weighted sorta Tron-esque knob. The Turbo Twist is mounted in the original 2P button hole, and the new 2P button location is just to right of the spinner. The spinner is tall enough that there's no chance of interference with the neighboring buttons. In hindsight I could have put the 2P button a little further to the right so that it could be more usable as a fire button, but it's not like there's a shortage of buttons on this thing anyway.
Buttons and sticks are now interfaced by an Ultimarc IPac-4, but the trackball is still using the original X-Arcade interface and the Turbo Twist uses the GGG interface board. I do have an OptiPac sitting around which I may wire these through sometime, but the optical devices actually work just fine as-is.
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Years back I had purchased someone's abortion of a cabinet project on Craigslist locally, and while the cabinet was itself was Terribad, I scored a lot of really nice parts for way cheap and scrapped the cabinet. The new parts in the X-Arcade, with the exception of the Turbo Twist, all came from Terribad.
The Terribad cab (this is the seller's original craigslist pic). May it rest in hell:
BTW, if Twisty reads this, remember that AMD 2200 system I sent you? This is where it came from 
Edited by jeremymtc (10/07/14 04:40 AM)
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