a while ago I received a forgotten worlds PCB and a set of these from a good friend on neo-geo.com , with an interesting request: let's make a blast city kit for it
alhough in good shape, one of them wasn't working. I replaced the optical sensors ( http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/e ... ND/1637162" ) and It was good as new.
I really dig the look of the Japanese panel for it, but I could not find any actual art scans, or repros.. only this screenshot.
so I busted out Gimp, a bit of stretching , sheering, cut & pasting' and I had a mock-up , far from print ready but ready for tracing. I created a panel template with the holes located very in specific locations, to go around the plastic ribs in the Blast City control panels. Those ribs almost made the project impossible.
found a company to create the stainless steel panels, took some going back and forth, I learned that people here are hell bent on using an archaic measuring system and they can't be trusted to convert between it and metric. Settled for 18GA 304 stainless. laser cut. here it is primed with holes for carriage bolts. Props goes to Franco for helping with the cad file.
During all this back and forth with the sheet metal fab guys, I had time to learn Inkscape, an open source vector drawing program. It took me a while to create the overlay due to all damn details ( and the fact that I was a complete inkscape n00b ) , but when it came back from the print shop I was pretty happy with it !
putting everything together:
Normally, the game has the push spinners wired directly to a 14pin JST headers on the CPS1 board. I wanted a cleaner look, so I decided to leverage the 10 pin AMP connector on the blast. it provides +5v for the spinners and channels 8 pins to the i/o board inside the cab . Then I just built a little harness that goes from the blast i/o to the CPS1 pcb.
and finally
now, time to go collect some Zennys while the marquee is getting made
