Apr 202006
 

I then went after one of the parts that I have been dreading for quite some time. The bezel set up. The bezel is an important piece as it hides all the guts from the player. It also masks off any stray light that might come off the monitor, into the cab, or the opposite, light from the internal electronics that might leak out. This process actually went much easier than I thought that it would. Either I am getting better at this stuff or God happened to give his blessing that day.

I cut the two pieces that would support the bezel. I used the monitor brace as a guide. I cut 2 boards to the height above the monitor that I thought that the bezel should be and set them on top of the brace. I then used those 2 boards to hold the bezel rails in place. I glued them in. After it had dried, eagerly put the bezel and glass in to see how it would look. The board was too low. So, I cut some very thin strips of mdf (somewhere between 1/16 and 1/8) thick. I glued them to the current bezel rails. Still to low. So I added another set of strips and this time it was right. Whoopee!. I had to figure out how to keep the bezel and glass from slipping out. So I used another piece of angled aluminum. I cut a piece of wood that would span the inside of the cabinet. I secured it to the walls with angle brackets. With the bezel and glass in place, I screwed the aluminum piece to the cross piece.

Now I am working on the CP. So many crucial choices. Crap, what is a guy supposed to do?!?
In the background I have been working on the computer. I have a fresh load of Win XP on it and have loaded MAME and all the important little things we need to make a cab go. I had some struggles with the Arcade VGA graphics card.This was a 3 week nightmare to get set up. It finally took a call to Andy (creator of the card). It was 12 am in the UK. Completely not the voice I expected from him. Cool guy though. We had to force windows to load the drivers. It was rejecting them every way I tried. We thought it was a bad board initially. After we fought with it for a while we got it going. Thanks again Andy if you are reading this.

BTW here is my test bench for my cab and monitor. I figured that the air hockey table was as good of place as any.

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