Another New Start

I sort of keep forgetting that I have a damned blog.

So, Project Teenymame is completed and I gave it to the gal I was intending on giving it to. I guess I can consider the Teenymame a Vanquished Foe.

What did I learn from it? Well, Woodworking Is Hard for the most part. I’m considerably better at electronics and graphic design than I am at screwing screws and covering up their holes with wood putty.

A lot better at using the airbrush tool in Photoshop than I am with a paintbrush on wood.

Also, I learned to not let the smoke out of components. I basically fried one computer in building the second revision. Whoops!

So yeah motherfuckers, back to writing on a blog that nobody cares about. I’m kind of hips-deep in working on Aeon Babel: The Genesis Saga for this retarded screenplay contest while at the same time gettin’ orky with Jeep mods. I’m moving in a few weeks down to RAS GAYGUS to chase money and pussy and need a method to haul all my shit down there. We’re intending on building a totally hillbilly roof rack out of scrap steel. I’m learning to weld! Which may as well be another categroy here on the page that nobody reads.

Seriously I checked the stats, I’ve had two visitors since May.

Getting Somewhere!

Fuck yeah!
I bought a router from my favorite pawn shop (Valley Jewlery and Loan in Sun Valley, rad place, go visit) and gaffled a channel cutter from Lowe’s since I’m a goddamned hardcore career criminal yo, I’m the baddest of the bad, the lowest of the low… No that’s wrong, I paid for it on my damn debit card and you know full well that I ain’t as hard as I make out on the internet.

Anyway, I had to modify the router to work, used a bunch of flat washers as spacers. Unfortunately the channel it cuts is way too wide and I’ll need to scam a bench grinder (yay pawn shops!) so as to flatten out the “spades” at the end of the bit. Luckily for me they’re made of carbide and wore the teeth right off of my brand-new file! A W E S O M E ~

Anyhow:

Here you can see how hard I struggled with that fucking router. Even though the channel is wider than some vaginas I’ve been in, the little strip of t-molding (by the way my shipment from t-molding.com came in yesterday, awesome~) remains centered. I’m going to have to go through a whole fucking tube of wood putty though to keep it seated.

Here we are with the cab upright and the main structural elements installed. The bottom was the hardest part. Tomorrow I’ll go into Depot and score some 12″ pre-cut planks so as to save me some time on cutting the horizontal panels. Also I need to practice mitre cutting, hoopity hoo. I think I might just buy a damned router bit for that.

Lessons Learned:

- Man quit being cheap on tools and stuff, buy the damned good plunge router instead of the cheapass laminate router you fucking tool.

- You should have bought the cut disc tool from t-molding.com when you ordered, it’s not like you ain’t got a bundle in your paypal account or anything instead of burning up more money on modifying off-the-shelf bits.

- Dude cut the channel for the t-molding after you create the screw-holes for the structural parts, notice how the screws just crush the channel?

- Yeah that’s because the bit was cutting too deep, throwing a few fender washers onto the tool spindle should help out with that.

- Fuck yeah.

- Also buy more screws, the only reason you stopped was because you were out.

- Also quit talking in the second person, Jesus fucking Christ.

More on this fantastic project as events warrant.

Woodworking

Bah! Bah I say!

I’ve been trying to design my cabinet and holy fuck piss shit on a goat tits is this ever fucking hard!

See, I want my cab to be as tiny as possible while at the same time emulating the look and feel of an oldschool arcade cabinet. I thought I had it down, of course until I started cutting.

And then I realize that trying to get a corner to look nice is next to fucking impossible.

I got some overlaps with the circ saw and my corners got all jaggy and ugly looking. Dammit.

For the second piece, I attempted to make up some stops and then cut the remainder with a handsaw.

That didn’t work out at all.

Not only were my corners fucked off, I somehow got the geometry wrong on the second part.

I fucking suck at this.

Back to the old drawing board, I guess.

It works!

So I guess that a 2003 vintage Mame23kpp that I downloaded from Zophar’s Domain of all places (man, was I ever shocked that ZD still exists, figured it’d gone the way of the dodo in this web2.0 world in which we’re livin’. Hats off to ZD for sticking around!) works just fine on a 1998-vintage Pentium 2-class computer. For that I’m grateful.

However, no matter which version of Mame I use, the screen has a green tint to it. I suppose I could poke around the fora and help files a bit and figure out what the heck is the problem. I’m assuming though that it’s a video mode issue in Windows itself.

Now, I just need to get the game select utility to open up, and then my Zeroth Proto will be up and running and I can start working on the cabinetry.

Keyboard Hack II

After having mapped out the circuits in the previous step and drafted a matrix per the instructions on the hack page, I proceeded to jump contacts in order to test the veracity of my previous work. For what it’s worth, the only keyboard test utility from this page that worked was KeyScan v0.9. The rest crashed out instantly upon running. Your mileage may vary.

A few of the keys were mismapped (LCtrl was mapped to F5, but I retraced the path and discovered that I was off by a rank). Once I got that figured out, I began soldering.

Uh, shit! I’m befuddled by the appearance of my old nemesis: that black semiconductor surface that solder won’t stick to. Since I’ve already sunk about ten hours into this project, I wasn’t about to be defeated by this point.

I crossed my fingers and x-acto’d the black shit off of the terminals. I was surprised and relieved to see that the material flaked right off, leaving the bare copper exposed. A little test solder adhered right on. I wished I’d known this a week ago before I broke the old Sidewinder. Live and learn, onward and upward.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of soldering, per my first post on the subject. I was having a hell of a time getting the solder to transition from the spool to the iron to the wire to the contact. All the solder would ever want to do is pool on the iron and never stick to the surface I want it to.

So, I tried a different solution. First, I puddled a little bead of solder on my pine board. I used this to “tin the ends” of the wires. I heated the bead to liquidity and plunged the twisted end of the wire into the T1000 mass, pulling it out before it set.

Then I took a bead from the solder spool and melted it onto the contact. Once it went liquid, I noticed that the solder settled very neatly on the exposed contacts. Once the solder was solidified, I re-applied the iron, re-liquifying it. Simply pressing the tinned-ends of the wire into the liquid solder caused an instant bond. Fuck yeah! This is a hell of a lot easier than I thought it’d be!

An hour or so later, I’m left with this:

Doublechecking my work shows that the matrix is still intact. I conneced a button to the interface board and tested functionality. Everything works as intended and hopefully tomorrow, I’ll have my input device sorted out.

Fuck Yeah fistpump.

Keyboard Hack

I ain’t a dude to allow a little thing like getting laid off stop me from completing this project. After all, I’ve already spent the money on the parts. They’d just go to waste. So fuck it, onward and upward right?

THE COWARDS! THEY HIDE FROM US INSIDE CARDBOARD BOXES!

= ROUND ONE =
All right! Upon arrival from work, what do I find resting on my porch but two boxes branded with Newegg heraldry!

Fuck yeah my parts order arrived! I hurriedly tore the boxes open and proceeded with clicking RAM into RAM slots and pushing ATX adapters into their recepticles. Then I got to this:

And I instantly had a panic attack. What the fuck is this? I ordered a fucking IDE drive and I have never in my life seen this connector before what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck

After being talked down by Usagi and Ragu in our IRC channel (pound ecchi underscore attack on the espernutz), it appears that I have a SATA drive there. Neato! Welcome to Century Twenty One, Tome! What you have there in your hand is a real-live honest-to-God SATA drive!

I’m so far out of the loop that I don’t even know what the loop looks like. There was a time when IDE, AGP and the like were cutting-edge and I was riding that wave, hanging ten the whole while. Flash forward a decade and those connectors are obsolete. Thanks for forwarding the memo to my inbox, guys.

Oh well, kick reason to the curb and surpass the impossible, right? Fuck yeah! Except the PSU I ordered is an IDE power supply. Insert frowny-face emoticon here.

I gave Newegg a ring and discussed return and exchange options with the phone rep. He looked at my ticket and said “aw man you know what, don’t sweat returning the unit, here’s a full refund.” I was totally shocked. Holy shit was that ever awesome of a dude to do for another dude. As I reached into the PSU’s packaging to retrieve the plastic wrap in hopes I could maybe repack it and take it to the Used Computer Warehouse on So. Virginia in exchange for some other parts I was needing, what flopped out of the box but a molex-to-SATA Y-adapter.

Derp. Derpitty derpa derp doo. Now I feel as if I had defrauded the nice guys at Newegg. If I had the tiniest shred of ethicality in me, I’d feel bad about the incident. Oh well!

Below, you can see the guts laid out on my scrap pine prototyping board.

That Atom board is cute as the dickens, but I’m rather annoyed that the PSU is almost the same fucking size. The Atom board is 7″x7″x1 3/4″ while the PSU is 6″x”6″x3 1/2″. Niggaz that be all runnin’ calc from they command lines can easily tell that the board occupies 85 3/4″^3 while the PSU occupies 126″^3, and man, there’s something just unnatural about about a power supply occupying more space than the guts that it’s trying to run. I wish that someone made a generic ATX adapter that can lead off of a generic laptop PSU. That’d save me a ton of effort and anguish.

I’m postulating tearing the PSU apart and running it as bare, or semi-exposed parts. A quick shine inside with the flashlight shows that the form factor is effectively empty, and I’ll be able to save a few cubes of volume by removing the case and building a more compact heat shield. We’ll see what happens once I get this thing fired up and a copy of XP installed.

Proof-of-Concept

Some months back, I got the idea that I’d work on building a little bitty MAME cabinet utilizing an Intel Atom board/proc combo and a 12″ LCD display. The idea stagnated until I saw this (Google translation of what appears to be a spanish page). In which a dude builds an adorable little cabinet for his Neo-Geo home console. Super-duper sweet! So, the fire had been re-lit under my carcass and away I went to work on a teenycab of my own.

First things first, yesterday I ordered the board, an Atom running at something insane like 2.1Ghz, a 350W PSU, 80GB HDD (which was 21 bucks holy shit!) and a 1GB stick of DDR2 for – take a seat why don’t you, it’ll knock you on your ass – nine dollars American. Fffffffffff~ My entire Newegg purchase was $145 shipped, it should arrive by Tuesday.

Then, I ordered a 12″ VGA LCD from a dude on ebay, it was $55 shipped. All in all, I’ve spent $200 on this project.

A friend of mine in Gardnerville who runs a vintage electronics shop had a bunch of arcade parts lying around in his shop, so I scored from him 12 buttons and two 8-ways. Usagi Sauce (Roscoe) sent me a a couple of 8-ways he’d had lying around. Having enough parts to proto, I got right to it!

After rearranging things a bit in the ol’ carhole, I’d built up a little work space, an ad-hoc workbench which I’ll eventually get around to making a totally billy bitchin’ badass workbench, but that’ll be another post for another time.

The main idea I’d had for at least my POC was to adapt a USB gamepad into an arcade controller interface. I’d intended on using this proto as the 2P controller for the main unit, I can use this to learn how things work before diving feetfirst into building the cabinet for reals.

I started off by making an assessment of the tools I had at hand. Power drill, bit index, rulers, tapes and measures. Saws, both of the hole and hand variety. As well as a cheapo soldering iron and multimeter. Feeling properly equipped, I made a quick run to the local Home Depot to acquire more hardware.

There, I scored a countersink bit (so screwholes will be flush) and a few scrap 8″ pine planks to use as media.

Pretty much all I’d need is right here.

So, I got to work, first things first, I used the holes on the 8-way as a template to drill the holes that’d hold it in.

Not pictured: I used a 1 1/4″ hole saw in the derived center of these holes to mount the stick. The stick has ample clearance to actuate the switches at all eight positions.

Then, I took a rough measure of the distances between my fingertips so as to drill the holes for the buttons.

You can see my cruddy woodworking and draftsmanship skills on the front of the plank there. I never admitted to being anything other than complete shit with my hands.

After the holes were drilled, I took a measurement of the depth of the 8-way. The 8-way’s shaft protrudes 2 1/2″ from its flush point. So, in order to know that I had enough clearance, I measured three inches and cut the plank to fit.

Buh, I need a Sawzall or circular saw.

As I installed the buttons, I realized that I cut the holes too close to one another, there’s overlap between the 2 – 3 and 4 buttons. Oops. Also, the 1 1/4″ hole saw I used was a little too big. That’s the point of the proto stage, I guess. Work out the bugs, figure out what I’m doing wrong and overcome those obstacles, bust through the other side in awesome triumph!

Since my original idea was to use an old Microsoft Sidewinder (what had a sticky Left key) for an interface board, I’d taken the liberty of freeing the board from its shell and fabricating a few wooden washers from the holes I’d previously sawed out of the top plank so as to not interfere with the circuitry on the bottom half of the board.

Once the board was secured to the plank, I took the unit inside and plugged the Sidewinder into my machine then brought up the gamepad properties in the control panel. I tested the functionality by shorting the contacts between buttons and watching their corresponding lights blink on the control panel. Sweet shit! Looks like jumping the connections works no problem.

One would think.

It appears that one cannot solder directly to the semiconductor button surfaces. No big right, I traced the lines on the board from transistor to transistor, jumped the connections at a solderable point and checked for continuity. This process seemed to work!

Uh except I’ve like, never soldered on anything smaller than speaker wire.

As you could have expected, I broke the fucking transistor. Microsoldering is hard, gentlemen.

The red circle is from where the tiny little transistor (out of focus, above) came. Derp.

So, what have I learned?

1. I need a 1″ hole saw for the buttons. Also I have a digital micrometer, I should use it instead of fighting with bendy, infuriating tape measures. Also – use a mechanical pencil to mark on the wood, not a ball-point pen, the ball-point is hell of inaccurate, it wobbles all over the place.

2. Pine is fuckheavy. Switch to a thinner veneer particleboard for the horizontal surfaces and use a formica composite for the vertical surfaces (that way you can put the neato T-moulding trim pieces around the vertical standing edges)

3. I was hoping I would have been able to modify existing PC controller hardware to suit this project. It appears however, that I’m going to have to buy the IPac2 interface board from Ultimarc. I guess this is going to cost me twenty dollars more per unit than by using the controllers, but what I’ll be spending in dollars I’ll more than be making up for in labor (assuming that my labor is worth $12.50/hr – which is my current pay rate – I’ve blown about $40 on converting this ten dollar controller). I need to bite the bullet and buy the damn IPac2 units.

So far, this has been a rad learning experience. Updates posted as events warrant.