Superjazz

It all started a few years ago when I discovered the book Project Arcade: Build your own Arcade Machine! I have always been a closet old-skool gamer and so I bought the book. As soon as I had devoured its information, I began designing my own.

It flopped. Quickly. I never got out of the planning stages for the machine. There was no room at home, and it would end up costing too much. But I did order enough buttons for a two player panel, and the extremely expensive (but high quality) iPac encoder. I ended up drilling a few holes with a spade bit and plonking it all on a piece of wood that I sat between two boxes. That thing was hideous.

Jump forward 6 months, and a new workshop room had been constructed at BGS. I now had access to a multitude of machining tools: CNC, drill press, laithe, it was all there. I decided to dismantle my mess of buttons and start from scratch on a more aesthetically appealing box. My first stop was Morningside Plastics where I bought some dangerous looking [carcinogenic when wet] glue and lots of transparent perspex. After measuring up everything, I went into the workshop and started to bend and drill my perspex into shape. My presence piqued the interest of one of the teachers who runs classes in the room. He asked me what I was building, and I told him that I was building an arcade control panel. Suffice to say the teacher was also loved classic games and I offered to show it to him when I had completed it. I was really pleased with the end result, and after showing it to a few people, I realised how much demand there was for such a device.

Grade 11s at BGS were starting a new subject: Technology Studies. New projects for them to build were needed. The teacher I had showed the panel to approached me and asked if I would tell him what I did to construct it. I gave him the names of the suppliers that I used and although it would have been a great project, the cost of the encoders was far too much. Enter plex.

Everyone has a genius-type friend; my genius-type friend is plex. He has answered every question about electronics that I have not been able to answer myself and as a result I have learned an immeasurable amount about building things from him. He was the guy who got me into AVRs! When I told him about my arcade panel, I found that he too was into old-skool games (is everyone secretly into them?). One thing led to another, and he agreed to help out with the project: he was going to build an encoder for far less than the ones that were sold in shops.

Plex constructed the first encoder on a piece of veroboard. It was called Facade and sent keypresses via the ps/2 port. It had too many issues with line noise however, so he moved onto creating a USB edition. This was given the name HIDeous Arcade (see picture above). The ‘HID’ part comes from the fact that it shows up as a HID joystick in the USB subsystem. The major advantage of this is that a large number of panels can be connected to one computer and no reconfiguring of keys is needed. I made a minor tweak to the code, reprogrammed the micro and then showed the teacher. After a good session of gaming, he decided to include it in the curriculum!

The parts came in soon after. PCBs were ordered and boxes of components began rolling in. At the risk of sounding weird, my favourite part of this whole process was standing in front of about a cubic metre of arcade buttons. A short script combined with three hours of switching chips in and out of the ZIF socket daughterboard on my STK500, and students were ready to build their panels.

The students are currently constructing their controllers. Hopefully I will be able to snap a picture or two of the finished ones and put them up here. It was a great project to be involved in, and it was also an invalueable learning experience. At some point the encoders will be on sale, so watch this space!