Construction

The Super Chalktendo Entertainment System

Step 1... the Control Panel

After the initial concept and design was established, I needed to get to work. The single most important piece of the Super Chalktendo Entertainment System (SCES) is the user interface... commonly known as the control panel. The control panel needed to be easily accessible by 4 grown adults, and as intuitive as a generic interface can be. With that in mind, I cracked open Photoshop and constructed my first design of the control panel:

The control panel was drawn to 1:1 With the assistance of my lovely wife Holly, we printed out the control panel, sat it on the island of our kitchen, and pretended to play the SCES. I also took it to my parents home and had the fam pretend to play all together. I cannot stress enough how important this step is, because I realized I had a few problems with the above design... the joysticks were too far away from the edge, the control panel itself was WAY too big, and due to the design it was still crowded for 4 players. Later, I made my tweaks to the control panel, added graphics, and below is the final result:

This control panel was ready to go. It's smaller, pulls the trackball (the big white cross) and P-1 and P-2 joysticks closer to the edge, and also added some neat graphics. See the Links section to see my links to several good graphics websites. I had the panel printed at my local Kinkos. I just needed a nice sharp image because I knew that I would be placing my printout underneath lexan (think plexiglass you can cut and drill), so I didn't need anything fancy. Kinkos did an excellent job as this was just a big poster in their eyes.

Step 2... Cabinet Assembly

This was a lot of hard, hard work. As such, not many pictures were taken of the actual consturction of the cabinet. As you could probably tell by my set of design plans, a lot of engineering was done "on-the-fly", which meant making many measurements, and working with my Dad on how to fabricate the pieces so that they would fit together and look good.

I should probably step back a second and give you a "big picture" of what we were trying to do...

First, let's look at the materials used in the cabinet:

    • 3/4" Birch Plywood (5 4x8 sheets)

    • Lexan (plexiglass) for the control panel and the marquee cover.

    • Hinges for the control panel lid, stereo doors, and front cabinet.

    • Fabric to cover the stereo and subwoofer panels.

    • Glass (tinted) for the TV shade and the front cabinet.

    • A typical fluorescent light and bulb for the marquee backlight.

    • Tons of wood filler and sandpaper.

    • Wood paint primer.

    • Believe it or not, Rustoleum Flat Black paint. (Black is black is black....)

Now, let's look at this "finished" picture with my PhotoShop doodling on it to see how my Dad and I attacked this project:

We started with the base first (in purple)... it's good to know your footprint, so that's where we started. It's completely hollow to allow for cabling to run between the front and back cabinets.

Next we attacked the back pedestal, followed by the TV cabinet, then the front pedestal, and finished with the control panel. Some pictures below:

Here you can see the back pedestal and the TV cabinet. Also you can see the sheet of Lexan that we were getting ready to cut for the Control Panel.

Here you can see the back portion of the cabinet and also on the far right you can see the base sitting up on end. In the foreground, you can see the control panel printout fresh from Kinkos.

Speaking of the control panel, we hit on an interesting technique for manufacturing the control panel. We sandwiched the lexan between the top and bottom pieces of the control panel and attached them together with screws and clamps. We then careful cut the control panel printout from Kinkos, tracing the outline of the printout onto the sandwiched panel. We also marked where the various buttons and joysticks would be located. Once everything was marked, we made our cuts and drilled our holes... since everything was sandwiched together and drawn from the actual control panel printout, we knew everything would fit together perfectly.

Here you can see the cuts being made, as well as the sandwiched boards and lexan. This worked out really great. Also, above my Dad's wrist you can see the front pedestal completed.

The completed control panel pieces are now cut out... we just need to fit them all together with some side pieces... the angles were fun to get just right, but nothing that we hadn't done already.

We also added a keyboard drawer that is really just a pull-out piece of wod. The keyboard we are using for this machine is a wireless RF keyboard with a thumb trackball. Since it can be used anywhere, the drawer is just a place to set it when you want to be front-and-center doing work on the SCES. It did not have to function as storage of the keyboard, and no wires needed to be ran to it, so this drawer was pretty easy. Also, I can put a flight-stick or any other piece of equipment that I desire on there as well.

Step 3... Sand, Fill, Sand, Fill, Sand, Fill, Sand... you get the idea... then finally prime... and Sand... THEN Paint (and dodge raindrops!!!)

So I think you get the idea here. The key to getting a great finish is to have a perfect painting surface. This involved a *LOT* of square footage to sand, so my Dad and I enlisted my Mom and my Wife and we all got started sanding. Surface preparation and priming literally took 2 weekends worth of work, and was by far the hardest part of the project... but boy did the results turn out sharp!!!

Step 4... PC Configuration and list of other wiring items.

When not working on the cabinet, I was working on the PC. The PC componenets consisted of the following:

    • AMD Athlon XP 1500

    • 512 MB RAM

    • Nvidia TI 4200 Video Card

    • 40 GB Primary HDD space for Operating System software

    • 160 GB HDD for Video Game Machine data

    • Soundblaster Live Value sound card (had it laying around)

    • 54 Mbps Wireless Network card

I also bought a TV Tuner card, but ended up putting that in my server computer, as I didn't want to leave the SCES powered up 24/7 to record television when I already had a webserver running.

Finally, I bought the following items to turn the computer into the SCES:

    • Ultimarc I-PAC 4 Player Keyboard Encoder

    • Ultimarc Opti-PAC optical trackball/rotary mouse emulator

    • Ultimarc trackball (cheaper than HAPP and works great!)

    • Oscar Controls rotary spinner

    • 4 HAPP Competition joysticks (8-way), 1 HAPP Super Joystick which I mounted as a 4-way joystick.

    • Lots of pushbuttons (count them on my control panel if you wish)

And to round out the electrical/wiring issues of the cabinet as a whole:

    • 2 Powered 4-port USB hubs (one was mounted inside the control panel for the controls, one mounted inside the front pedestal)

    • A switching power strip (and surge protector) that powers the rest of the power strip when the PC power is on.

    • A 4-way Audio/Video switch for loads of inputs in the front of the unit.

    • USB extension cords, along with RCA, stereo, and S-Video cords.

I loaded the latest copy of MAME available with a full set of Roms and Mamewah as the front end. Now the PC was ready to be mated with the cabinet!!!

Step 5... Time to wire and test!

We attached the lexan and control panel print-out to the top of the control panel using several small screws (painted black) along the outside of the panel. The screws are barely noticeable, and are uniformly placed around the outside. The joystick buttons and trackball mount is enough to keep the center together, but we didn't want someone's shirt snagging a corner and causing problems, so we made sure to fasten everything down nice and tight.

Once we had the control panel top together, it was time to start wiring!

We used CAT5 ethernet cable for our wiring, as it allowed us to group buttons and joysticks together under one cable. We used uninsulated copper wire for the common ground the connected all of the buttons together. The spots on the board are where we attached handles for painting the control panel. Since the underneath of the panel is never visible, we did not bother to cover over these missed paint spots.

The brain of the beast, the Ultimarc IPAC, is the final destination of most of the controls on the panel.

And finally, the whole unit is wired together. We used adhesive clips to route the wiring and keep everything neat. The other board on the left is the Ultimarc OptiPac.

The only control that isn't routed to one of these two boards is the Master Power button. It is ran to a small cord with a plug that we assembled. That plug connects to another custom extension cord that connects to a wire running out of the back of the PC. The PC wire runs to the physical power switch on the PC unit. This allows you to power on the PC (and thus the whole system thanks to my special power strip) by pressing a button on the panel.

You can also see in the above picture the TV I used, a 25" Philips TV with SVIDEO inputs, along with the PC I used. The thing sitting on top of the PC is the wireless keyboard head unit.

With it all wired up, it's time to test!

My Mom took the honors of playing the first game on the Control Panel, playing Frogger. (For those wondering, my wife took the honors of playing the first game when the unit was finally assembled-- Ms. Pacman)

And here is my Dad giving it a try as well. Looks like we're onto something here! This thing may just work!

Step 6... Transporting and Final Assembly

Once we got the control panel mounted into its box, we added the marquee and light. The marquee was printed at Kinkos as well on a special transarent plastic that really turned out will. We sandwiched the printout between 2 pieces of lexan and built a lightbox for it into the back pedestal. We also got speaker fabric from a JoAnn's fabric store and wrapped a frame we constructed for the speaker doors. Finally, we got the glass from a local glass shop cut exactly to size with hinges. Once all of that was installed, it was time to move the machine to my home and get it set up!

We loaded the SCES into the family van and headed to my home. The SCES travelled well and assembled even easier. We put pegs into the various pieces to ensure they locked into alignment properly, and then drilled screws into the wood to lock them in place. After running all of the wires through the base unit and hooking everything up, it was time to power the machine up. It worked beautifully!!!

For finished shots of the machine, feel free to go on to the next section, "Completed Pictures".