MAME Arcade - Knobs, buttons, and lights, oh my!

I’ve been hesitant to seal up my cabinet because I had a major hurdle to overcome. My monitor. I have no way to turn it on without pressing the power button.

Well, (I’m embarrassed to even admit that I hadn’t checked long ago), the monitor will remember its on/off status if I kill power to it. This doesn’t really make sense to me, since it has a momentary type switch (as opposed to a regular on/off switch), but whatever…I’ll take it. It’s possible there’s a small capacitor on-board that provides enough juice for that purpose. If it turns out that I need to crack open the monitor and wire in a remote switch, I will.

With that said, there’s no reason for me not to close it all off, as originally planned. I found a permanent home for the volume control, as well as the momentary on/off switch for the PC.

The volume went just underneath the control panel overhang with some double-sided tape to hold it in place.

The power switch went on the diagonal portion of the cabinet. I soldered the power connections, and then hot-glued the switch in place.

The last piece of the puzzle is the fluorescent light I use for the marquee. It’s temperamental, and I have to tap on it a few times to get it to pop on. If I’m going to finish up this cabinet, I can’t have hardware that works sometimes, so I decided to ditch that light and go with some LED strip lights. A little bonus is that I can ditch the existing 120-volt wiring I have (dangling) and replace it with some 5 or 12 volt stuff. I’ll have more on this in future posts, where I’ll talk about motion activated front end software, motion activated lights, and voice control!