State of the Union

Dan had a pretty epic post yesterday, but I wanted to throw a few pictures in, give an update on the progress thus far, and detail where we go from here. The only new addition since the weekend is the picture above: the light for the marquee. (Edit: Sorry again for the crap formatting, I can't get the two pictures below to resize.)

Control Panel:
- We've mentioned before that we're working with acrylic as the CP overlay, and it's extremely difficult. We almost broke a whole sheet trying to cut it the first time and I think both of us got a little frustrated. Well, after all the building on Sunday, we tried a different approach and it worked perfectly. We clamped the entire piece in between two pieces of MDF, except for the portion that was being cut off. After scoring it about 10-12 times a side, we simply hit the exposed part with a hammer and it came right off.
- With that victory in our pocket, we decided to go for broke and start drilling holes. Using the same setup (acrylic in between two pieces of MDF), we starting cutting holes with a 1 1/8" boring bit. The fear here was that we would crack the acrylic, but after four holes, it looks pretty good. We still have another 37 to go, so we're not out of the woods yet, but it's a good start. (Cut some arcylic once, the sound and smell are interesting...)
- Dan has been working on the CP graphic, and it looks great thus far. We decided to go with an amalgam of classic game characters and arrange them. The version below is very low res and just a mock up with the images cut out and randomly placed; they will be resized and arranged in the final product. (Edit: direct link to the CP mock.)

Sound:
- I'm hoping to pick up speakers in the next couple of days so we can go ahead and cut our speaker panel and get them mounted along with speaker grills. (Just not THESE speaker grills.)

Cabinet:
- I think we'll start painting sooner than we think. We're probably using a couple of coats of primer and then black satin paint.
- Ordering T-molding this week and I'm guessing we're just going to rent a router from Home Depot to make the cuts.
- The marquee has been planned and making the graphic shouldn't be a problem.
- We're still in the process of planning an efficient power on/off system.

TV:
- This is our last big hurdle I feel like, and something that we still can't mess around with. We're almost certainly going to take the tv out of it's case, but that's as much as we can plan for right now. Once we get it out, we'll be able to see our options for mounting it. To ensure that we don't kill ourselves, we did make a nice little tool similar to this: (Edit: direct link to the discharge tool.)


Software:
- I still have a little bit of work to do in terms of the front end, but for the actual emulator is nearly 100% ready to go.
- I still need to program the interface, but I can't do that until we wire the CP.