FINALLY! IT'S ALIIIIIVE!

As mentioned in a prior post, I have finished painting the stripe, which now look as good as Masking tape has to offer me. If I ever get inspired, I would still like to put 1-2 coats of polycrilic on for durability, but at this point it's quite presentable with its semi-gloss latex exterior.



I applied the vinyl control panel overlay & inserted all the controls. Then wired 'em up to the Mini-PAC. Given the small CP size, the wiring took me only like 10 minutes since i didn't need to crimp any connectors for splicing extension wire.



Next stuck the cp into the cabinet. It's so tight that it rubbed paint off the cab which will need to be touched up (barely visible just above the left end of the cp on the black side wall) but I don't need to worry about adding screws to hold it or anything. If need be, I have some velcro to give it more stick but I don't think that will be necessary.




Finally here's the full view of the cabinet, in place by my never-used in-wall woodfire rotisserie grill.




As always, there's still a list of to-do's but they're getting to be pretty minor. I've already mentioned that I still want to clear-coat the paint to protect it from little hands & stains. I need to touchup that black paint on the interior side walls where the CP scraped it. The door is still kinda tight due to the already tight fit worsened by the black paint. The plexi is also sorta tight and rubbing - could lose a good 1/8".

And, most importantly, the monitor needs some manner of bezel. I'm picturing getting some black gatorboard or matteboard & making something that way. I know there's some prefab plastic options too but there's so little clearance below the plexi that I'll need something flatter, or perhaps even simply mask the back of the plexi & paint the borders black from behind. This should hopefully solve most of the light pollution from the marquee light reflecting down off the back wall, but if it doesn't take care of it completely, I can put some aluminum foil or styrofoam or something behind the fluorescent tube light up there to make sure the light is going forward only.

The only other remaining business is customizing the interface itself to make the Mamewah menu system as ideal as possible. For some reason I have yet to fathom, it's resisting the display of the background image for the menu (just a solid color instead). Screenshots from the games are showing up just fine though so that's cool. I also want to customize the game lists to feature only vert games.