The controlpanel section

-Building the real thing-

Prototype -wood & glossypaper

I couldn't decide if I should go with 61.5cm x 22cm or x24cm - so I made the shorter one with cheap wood cut from the local Homedepot.

The printout has wrong colors and so I had no shame to use it for this test! With one button there is enough place to rest your hands on it - but I felt that it would be a bit to short if you've two rows of buttons (e.g. Streetfighter-layout), so I decided to go with the bigger ones. (24,21" x 9,45") The wood is only .5" thick, but I tried to abuse it really hard and it made absolutely no problems!

Yeah, now for something real!

This took me the whole saturday - never though that it would take that much time! Though I must admit I got up very late today.

You can't see it very well here -this is wood + glossypaper + Lexan sandwiched
and clamped together. I first made six holes to bolt them together.

No more clamps needed, the first bolts are screwed in!

Looks like explosion - this is the bimetal-circularsaw I use.

All holes drilled - I used the same size for the joystick-hole. On the top there is still the protectionpaper of the Lexan.

Voilà, first revealing! I had to take it apart for some dust cleaning.

The whole thing.

I made some changes to the original controlpanel-overlay as you might see. I needed it to match
my size but tried to make it look still authentic.I magnified the background graphics but not the buttonlabels.
As this is my 4/8-way joystick panel, I added a second actionbutton to the panel - this suits nearly all games
that feature only one joystick. I played Phoenix with a friend on my two-joysticks-prototypepanel and it really sucked, as you couldn't automatically switch from one joystick to the other - so this is the panel for alternating-games!