Thursday, August 17, 2006

Arcade Display - Making Progress


My Arcade Display project is almost complete. Actually, It'd be done already if someone didn't forget to add some critical parts to my last Digikey order. It's not important who so I won't mention it here. I was having trouble finding the perfect diffusion layer but alas, a quick walk down to my local Staples store produced the material I was looking for. I needed a substance that was thick enough to hide unlit segments yet transparent enough to allow a good amount of light through. A couple of ordinary legal sized sheets of paper "borrowed" from the copy machine worked out to my liking. You can see the results in the picture above. Clean design, huh? It really looks cool when whole words start scrolling across it. Curious, why didn't I take a picture of that. Check out my previous post to see what it looks like without the paper and plexi.


Oh, and check out the wiring job. It's like I've done this before or something. And I saved around $200 making the jumpers myself. I'm sure I'll regain the use of my fingers and eyesight any day now. How am I writing this post you ask... smell and taste. I play pinball the same way.

So, what's next. When my RS232 level converted arrives, I'm gonna connect this baby up to the Arcade's PC and rock some old fashion serial communication. The goal is to display game names and high scores when playing MAME and artist/song names when playing music. I'll have to dust off my Visual C++ skillz for that. Stay tuned for updates.

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