Scott's Blog

The self adhesive poster came back from the printers and I quickly realized that I should have re-measured the MAME console. The SVG file that I used was the original blueprints, but not exactly what I actually ended up cutting. My final console ended up being a bit deeper than the plan and some of the holes were placed by eye. So you can see in the image that some decals that were supposed to be on the sides (like "Nintendo" and the packman ghosts) ended up appearing on the bottom. Also, some of the holes don't line up nicely with the text like "Start" and "Pause" are more obvious. The resolution also isn't that great, I'm guessing that it's 100 DPI instead of 300 DPI which I was expecting. But from a distance it looks pretty nice and I'm still glad that I went and did it. I'm a little wiser now - next time I'll make sure to remeasure.

Here's my and my Son's effort for a MAME console design. Not the prettiest, but it was fun creating it. I've sent it to the printer's and it should be ready tomorrow. The one I sent to the printer doesn't have the circles nor the black border which comes from my original design when I built it three years ago. The format that they liked the best was the PDF version which Inkscape exported without any problems. The mistake I made was to not to shrink the "paper" to the size of all the boxes so I ended up paying for a little extra white that I probably won't need (it ended up being R$35.11). I think I should have also left cut marks in the diagram to make it easier to align and cut out the pieces, we'll see if that will be necessary.

I've been wanting to make a plastic print to cover my my son's MAME console for a while now (3 years already?). All I need to do is get some bitmaps, or even better some scalable vector images, from a couple of games, put them together and send it to the printer, right? I knew I was in trouble, when after a few searches I got my own blog listed. Seems there aren't that many game fans making nice svg images of popular videos game characters. I did find, however, the spriters-resource.com which has the sprites from a lot of games, the problem is, they are all tiny. For example, here's what Megaman looks like . Zooming that up 8 times, for instance looks kinda crappy: Using the cubic interpolation 8x does only a so-so job: I tried various filters and effects and got the look I think I wanted which you can see here: I wanted to fiddle with the steps so I put it all in a python plugin which you can find here (here's a direct link to the code which may have some u...

My joystick, buttons and IPac interface card arrived in the mail. I've done a lot of research on building an arcade cabinet or control panel and I can tell you there's no definitive guide out there on the internet for building a control panel. In fact it's worse, many (maybe most) people seem to their own layout and usually get it wrong . A common mistake for two player setups is to have player one with the joystick on the left and buttons on the right (correct) and player two with the joystick on the right and the buttons on the left (wrong !). On top of that, most people put up photos of their cabinet but not the plans. Or if they have plans it's for the cabinet and not for the control panel (i.e. the buttons and joysticks). I had the following constraints for my son's control panel: I wanted it as small as possible, but no smaller. I want it to play most games with a joystick including SNES and most PSX games. This means at least four buttons per player. I w...