IRL Projects/Hobbies!

[YEET]

Hello users of this forum! I want to make this thread to be somewhere where you can post projects that you are making IRL just to show them off, get feedback, or just for fun! It's a way for all of us to get to know each other better

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For my project, I am refurbishing an old "Iron Horse" arcade cabinet by Konami. I feel kinda bad because this cabinet/game is rated 10 on a rarity scale of 1-100. (1 being the most rare and 100 being most common. I really like this cabinet because of its close resemblance to donkey kong/popeye cabinets. The program I'm going to be putting inside the cabinet is called "hyperspin" and it's a front-end for emulators like mame and snex9x. I'm going to repaint the whole thing black and add LED tmolding. 

For example:

(tmolding is the rubber lining the cabinet.)

I'm also going to put on a custom marquee that I made in photoshop:

I'm not done with the marquee this is just a rough draft. I want to make sure I'm 100% satisfied before I get it printed on plexiglass I'm trying to put a symbol/character from every game inside the cabinet. 

Here's what the cabinet looks like as of today after I brought it home and put it in my room:

...(ignore the poster on the wall in the first one lol it's an inside joke p.s. none of those people are me lol)

I paid $300 for it on craigslist from a really cool guy who's a full time arcade collector. It's in great shape with no water damage and a working monitor/sound. I also have to add a new light for the marquee. The control panel is a bit steep but I don't mind that much. I'm going to completely re-do it and put 2 joysticks and 6 happ buttons for each player. I'm also going to add extra buttons for pausing, selecting, etc... The coin door works but I'm going to add custom "insert coin" buttons so you don't have to put a quarter in every time you want to play a game lol.

I want to make this thing as slick as possible while maintaining the classic "arcade" feel.

I want to try to get this done within 2 or 3 weeks.

Wish me luck I'll keep this page updated with more pictures as I go along!  

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As for the thread, post some cool projects that you're doing IRL! I'd really like to see what kind of hobbies you guys are in to!

[Squirrel]

(07-16-2017, 05:51 AM)YEET Wrote:

Hello users of this forum! I want to make this thread to be somewhere where you can post projects that you are making IRL just to show them off, get feedback, or just for fun! It's a way for all of us to get to know each other better

---

For my project, I am refurbishing an old "Iron Horse" arcade cabinet by Konami. I feel kinda bad because this cabinet/game is rated 10 on a rarity scale of 1-100. (1 being the most rare and 100 being most common. I really like this cabinet because of its close resemblance to donkey kong/popeye cabinets. The program I'm going to be putting inside the cabinet is called "hyperspin" and it's a front-end for emulators like mame and snex9x. I'm going to repaint the whole thing black and add LED tmolding. 

~snipping for brevity~

Here's what the cabinet looks like as of today after I brought it home and put it in my room:

...(ignore the poster on the wall in the first one lol it's an inside joke p.s. none of those people are me lol)

I paid $300 for it on craigslist from a really cool guy who's a full time arcade collector. It's in great shape with no water damage and a working monitor/sound. I also have to add a new light for the marquee. The control panel is a bit steep but I don't mind that much. I'm going to completely re-do it and put 2 joysticks and 6 happ buttons for each player. I'm also going to add extra buttons for pausing, selecting, etc... The coin door works but I'm going to add custom "insert coin" buttons so you don't have to put a quarter in every time you want to play a game lol.

I want to make this thing as slick as possible while maintaining the classic "arcade" feel.

I want to try to get this done within 2 or 3 weeks.

Wish me luck I'll keep this page updated with more pictures as I go along!  

---

As for the thread, post some cool projects that you're doing IRL! I'd really like to see what kind of hobbies you guys are in to!

lol! I can't believe that this is a room inside your house! My first thought was, "Yeah, sure, I can cheat, go to an arcade and take a few pics... lol.

But then I rememred a line I'd heard... that "He who brings home one arcade machine, is doomed to bring home more." If it were cats, you'd have to be older, a woman, and one day be doomed to have animal control wearing gas masks pay you a visit. :|


I'm stricken here by the compound nature of the project -- a machine with working parts, plus software. Both must function, or you have something that just takes up space.

I had one "project", except it was a work thing. A meat packaging plant had imported a device from Scandinavia that could measure how thick the exterior layer of fat was on a pig... so my job was to interface this device to what was essentially a milling machine. The device was RS232, which I knew because I'd written some serial RS232 drivers for modems. But it was my first time ever trying to get two completely different pieces of technology to interface together, and work as a cohesive unit.

All my other "projects" were generally for no money at all, and were purely software.

Hmm, and maybe, eons ago, interfacing old hardware to the first personal computers, as kids wanted to run BBSes. (Which, actually, the software these Forums runs on, is a from of, the 'BB' in 'MyBB' standing for the first two letters of BBS 'Bulletin Board'.) I had 8 inch drives ("floppy disks" from some of the first "Word processing machines", before it was miniatured some to the 5.25" format that lasted for years). My favourite, was a 5Mb (yes, thats "Mega", not Giga, lol) Corvus HD -- one of the first hard disks, that had a multiplexor, that allowed you to attach it to 4 different computers. In a way, it was an early "network drive". lol. With that, I managed to get a computer store to run one of the first multi-line BBSes... It actually used the 3 store lines, and (without the owners knowledge, ~cough, hack, wheeze~ his own personal line as the 4th line "after hours" to be a 4-line system. Each line was run by it's own PC (An Apple II computer, lol), and "chatting" was achieved by writing/looking for files by putting the line# into the file name. For the final touch, we interfaced a thermistor to it, so it dangled outside the store window, and people who logged in were triumphantly told how hot/cold it was outside the store.

Yeah, those were the days....... ~glazing eyes~

It's worth it. I have cr@ppy memory... but I have no trouble remembering that stuff!

My hat is off to @YEET and everyone else who takes on one of these things!

(Oh, I had one other final thing. About 15 years after the BBSes had all shut down -- they had this 'Internet' thing then, lol -- I was contacted by one of the guys I'd known from back then, who wanted to bring back the game I'd done on one BBS -- using one of those "game emulators" that was, in a way, a form of early "cloud" computing, by encapsulating a machine type (ie: Mac, or PC), and an O/S as a "layer" of computing.

He waffled on the idea when I told him, that yeah, I still had the source code for it somewhere, but he'd have to first also mimic an ancient MySQL-like binary-tree database called 'bTrieve', and that I only had it in hard copy, and he'd have to scan/input the 700-1000 pages of C++ source. lollll)

[intensive]

wTF Lol haha

[Shadow Fox]

It looks like your planning to open an Arcade and Casino.

Just don’t build a machine with any classic fighters on it because I’ll have to come over then. I can ignore Eagle’s gear for SFII!

(07-16-2017, 07:44 AM)Squirrel Wrote: lol! I can't believe that this is a room inside your house! My first thought was, "Yeah, sure, I can cheat, go to an arcade and take a few pics... lol.

There aren’t many Arcades for pictures these days. Some cities do have specialty Bars with Arcade games and Bowling.

What happened to that drone software project you were working on?

[Squirrel]

(07-17-2017, 02:06 AM)Shadow Fox Wrote: There aren’t many Arcades for pictures these days. Some cities do have specialty Bars with Arcade games and Bowling.

What happened to that drone software project you were working on?

Yeah, you're right there. The company I work for had it's Christmas Party at a specialty bar of the sort that you mentuioned, and they had a bunch of arcade machines -- a whole section of them. Guys love that stuff, and can still play pretty well, even when mostly hammered, so I think that was a smart move on their part. (lol)

I don't remember anything about a drone project though! If I said it, it was probably in jest... Sadly, I haven't done any software stuff in at least 10 years now.

The last time I did anything, my boss had given me an Excel sheet of dial-up pops that our customers could use in the USA, and there were ^%@#'n 8000+ numbers! He was expecting me to just create a web page by hand, and I thought, there is NO WAY that I am getting that bored!

[Doigt]

I have a confession to make. I have so many hobbies that I never run out of things to do, but I do lack the time to do all of them and thus I have very little time for friends, not that I am unhappy with that. I'd like to elaborate more, but I'd easily break the character limit and it wouldn't necessarily be interesting. However, I can summarize a bit the main hobbies I have. I said I can, but a sudden feeling of laziness is taking control of my senses as of writing this; perhaps later then.

My most time consuming-hobby of them all is probably computer stuff. I'm not much of an "ilr" person.

EDIT:

(07-17-2017, 02:36 AM)Squirrel Wrote: The last time I did anything, my boss had given me an Excel sheet of dial-up pops that our customers could use in the USA, and there were ^%@#'n 8000+ numbers! He was expecting me to just create a web page by hand, and I thought, there is NO WAY that I am getting that bored!

Madness. Pure madness. You'd have to write a program to automate a part of the site building to efficiently use your time without wasting it. And you'd have to chose: PHP, XML/XSLT or HTML ?

EDIT: I funny because I am working on something massive like that at the moment (not 8000+ stuff, but still a lot), it's a list of Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG cards released in 1999. Fun times.

[YEET]

UPDATE!

First day having the machine! I went out and got some paint, sanding equipment, brushes, rollers, and other stuff. (I had all this stuff but they all got destroyed... wonder how)

First I started with peeling off the decals on the sides of the machine. It was pretty easy! I was expecting it to stay on like how when you pull price tags off and they leave that crap on that takes you years to get off lol. I had to remove some bolts because they bolted straight through the side art trapping some decal under it. I could have just left it there but I want this thing to look professional. Once the side art was off I started to sand down both sides and the edges. Took about an hour because I wanted to make sure it was done right. Before I did all this I took off all the tmolding and measured it so I could order the new ones. At $4 a foot for the LED housing tmolding it wasn't cheap when I realized I had to buy 35 feet... Back to the cabinet. After I sanded the thing down I started painting the sides. Personally, it was my first time actually painting something that big. My dad used to paint my walls in every house I've lived in since I was a kid so the smell brought back some good memories. I'm waiting until tomorrow to put on the second coat because I need to go get some 250 grit sandpaper to sand the first coat. I also have to go get some gloss finish.

Here's what it looks like so far!

(This is only the first coat so it looks a bit... bad lol)

To Do List:

- Order custom marquee/install

- Get marquee light

- Install LED Tmolding

- Take off CPO and old buttons/joystick

-Repaint CPO

- Install new joysticks/buttons

- Figure out how to connect a CRT monitor to a computer........

Stay tuned!

[Squirrel]

(07-17-2017, 02:50 AM)Doigt Wrote: I have a confession to make. I have so many hobbies that I never run out of things to do, but I do lack the time to do all of them and thus I have very little time for friends, not that I am unhappy with that. I'd like to elaborate more, but I'd easily break the character limit and it wouldn't necessarily be interesting. However, I can summarize a bit the main hobbies I have. I said I can, but a sudden feeling of laziness is taking control of my senses as of writing this; perhaps later then.

My most time consuming-hobby of them all is probably computer stuff. I'm not much of an "ilr" person.

EDIT:

(07-17-2017, 02:36 AM)Squirrel Wrote: The last time I did anything, my boss had given me an Excel sheet of dial-up pops that our customers could use in the USA, and there were ^%@#'n 8000+ numbers! He was expecting me to just create a web page by hand, and I thought, there is NO WAY that I am getting that bored!

Madness. Pure madness. You'd have to write a program to automate a part of the site building to efficiently use your time without wasting it. And you'd have to chose: PHP, XML/XSLT or HTML ?

EDIT: I funny because I am working on something massive like that at the moment (8000+ stuff, but still a lot), it's a list of Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG cards released in 1999. Fun times.

lol! None of the above -- at the time, I had access to the server that had the company web site on it, and I just imported the database as a space delimited file, then wrote a quick PERL script to process that file and create the web page.

Plus, natch, I left the script there, just in case those #'s became updated and so on (which of course they were).

[YEET]

Updated the marquee a bit... Not entirely done with it yet. I still want to add a few more characters. Thoughts?

[YEET]

UPDATE!

Woke up, had some coffee, and spent the first 3 hours of the morning gutting out the entire thing. I'm keeping the monitor for now because I'm going to try to use it to keep the "arcade" feel. I don't know if I'll be able to hook it up though. I'm also going to try to salvage the speakers.

Here are some before and after pictures

This project is making my room a mess lol

[YEET]

I know no one really reads these or anything but It's fun just to share it. I have another update. Sadly, I had to remove the CRT monitor. I would have never been able to figure out how to connect it to my computer. It would have taken too long and I would have inevitably ended up spending way too much money on figuring it out. I replaced it with a much bigger monitor though. I did lose some of the "arcade" feel by replacing it with an LCD screen but I'm still going to put plexiglass over it to hopefully give it more of that feel. I started to add some other parts too like installing a power strip and computer inside. My tmolding comes in tomorrow so I'll be able to put the LEDs on. i also ordered some vintage mario graphics for the side that come tomorrow. I'm off to the hardware store now to get some gloss finish and some adhesive stripper so I can take off the CPO decals!

Here's what it looks like as of now:

[Doigt]

As a point of future reference for your projects, I did manage to connect an old tv to my computer to have that "nostalgic feel" when playing nes games on pc and I'll tell you one thing: They're not made for that. The res was all wrong and the images were blurry to the point where you couldn't read the stuff on the screen. It was laborious to fix and when it was done, it was still not quite exactly the thing I was looking for. In the end, it was just disappointment and bitterness.

I'm not sure if crt monitors work like old tvs, but if they do, then you could have ended in the same situation. I don't think you should regret that.

[EqAtOmBe]

(07-17-2017, 09:28 AM)YEET Wrote:

Updated the marquee a bit... Not entirely done with it yet. I still want to add a few more characters. Thoughts?

She has enough details if otherwise equilibrium will be broken

Only details that bustle are the space invender blur with the spaceship and the 3 phantom once on plexiglass with light it may be more blurry if you can catch those on the first picture would be fine

Mais gardez le faisceau laser  

But keep the laser beamVery nice project

[Squirrel]

(07-17-2017, 06:43 PM)YEET Wrote:

UPDATE!

Woke up, had some coffee, and spent the first 3 hours of the morning gutting out the entire thing. I'm keeping the monitor for now because I'm going to try to use it to keep the "arcade" feel. I don't know if I'll be able to hook it up though. I'm also going to try to salvage the speakers.

Here are some before and after pictures

This project is making my room a mess lol

Thanks for sharing thuis stuff with us?

To me, I can almost picture being a fly on the wall, watching you. (lol)

Your "To Do" list looks pretty daunting!

I'm guessing that arcade machines predated monitors, and were more a TV/CRT style? If thats the case, though, I would also think whatever minotor it has in it now is likely in the last stages of it's lifespan?

Good luck, and looking forward to your next update!

[Shadow Fox]

I liked the first marquee you posted better.

You can probably still find a computer CRT somewhere. The last CRT I owned died last year after about 10 years of use. A glossy LCD might give your set up a more classic feel as well.

Sadly, for this forum, your project is the only activity these days.