![\"Frinkiac](\"https:\/\/www.rickandviv.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/frinkiac7-35.jpg\")
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![\"Frinkiac](\"https:\/\/www.rickandviv.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/frinkiac7-side-35.jpg\")
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This is the second prototype of my arcade cabinet: the Frinkiac 7. My goal was to have something that resembled a bookcase or armoire rather than something that was a gaudy arcade-ish kind of thing. I didn’t succeed too well on that point with this prototype. This version of the cabinet was too large. I wanted a 30″ wide control panel because I thought I might try to put together a four-player panel someday. But the current version of the cab is only 26″. This second prototype was also too deep. The current version has the monitor sticking out the back a bit.<\/p>\n
My first prototype (which I didn’t take any pictures of!! Ugh!!) was just a wooden box, really. I used some scrap wood to play around with making control panels. When I created this second prototype, I didn’t want to have a non-working cabinet while creating the control panels for the wider cabinet, so I just screwed on little wings on each side of the existing panels from my older prototype. It looked really crappy, but the games were playable.<\/p>\n
Here’s a shot of my (then) 3-year-old nephew playing Pole Position on prototype 2! His father is stepping on the gas pedal and handling the shifting.<\/p>\n I designed the cab to take swappable control panels. This page shows what they looked like when I was running prototype 2. I’ve since rebuilt just about all of these panels in one form or another for use with the current version.<\/p>\n This panel was originally constructed to allow playing of most one player games (or more properly, games where only one player is playing at a time). There were two joysticks, but they were both wired together (this is still true of the remade version of this panel). The black joystick on the left is an 8-way stick, while the red stick is a 4-way. Actually, the red stick is an original Pac-man stick I got off eBay!<\/p>\n The black stick used (actually still uses) a joystick plate from Oscar controls<\/a> that can take joystick restrictors as well. I don’t think the joystick mounting plates or the restrictors are available anymore. The intent of the layout was to make playing Defender a more genuine experience (hence the single orange button next to the stick).<\/p>\n The button layout on the right works well for many games. The two black buttons on the left of the button layout were hard-wired to the left and right direction of the joysticks. This is great for games that had two buttons for moving left and right and gives the player a choice of controls (games like Space Invaders and Asteroids). However, when I remade this panel I decided not to include the left and right dedicated buttons. I found that I almost never chose to use the buttons myself, and nearly no visitor to my house preferred them either.<\/p>\n Sometime after creating this panel, I decided to redo it. I made a dedicated Defender panel using a real 2-way stick. This redesign also lasted into the current version of the arcade machine. Since the defender game-playing needs are taken care of by that panel, this panel was remade in a more generic in form. You can see the current 1 player panel on the current version<\/a> of the Frinkiac 7.<\/p>\n This panel was basically for games where two people play at the same time. It had two 8-way joysticks in place with six buttons each. As on the one player panel, the two joysticks are mounted in plates and can take joystick restrictors.<\/p>\n This panel was really a great panel for other emulators that I have running on the cab. In particular, one that I’m most excited about is an Intellivision emulator called Nostalgia by Joe Fisher. I LOVED<\/em><\/strong> the Intellivision unit I had growing up. It played games that were more sophisticated than what our friends’ Atari VCS (Atari 2600) could handle. And I think those games stand up better today than games on the old Atari.<\/p>\n For Intellivision games that just need a few buttons, this is really great. For example, Night Stalker has four firing directions that are chosen on the keypad. Within Nostalgia, I can map those four button presses to the four arcade buttons that are arranged in a diamond pattern. And of course other, simpler shoot-em-up type games are perfect for this treatment as well (Space Armada, Buzz Bombers, River Raid, etc., etc.).<\/p>\n I also had two Intellivision controllers mounted right onto the control panel. I got these controllers cheap from eBay auctions. The seller couldn’t guarantee that the Intellivision unit itself worked, but I didn’t care! I just needed the controllers. I hollowed out the backs of them and mounted a 4×3 array of switches just below the keypad. I was able to use the original Intellivision overlays and everything! I didn’t bother attempting to deal with the side buttons or the directional disc, since that was handled much better by the arcade controls.<\/p>\n Alas, this design just didn’t survive. It was decently cool, but I found that if I wanted to play Intellivision games, I really wanted to hold the controllers in my hand, just like when playing the real thing. Having them mounted into the panel just didn’t turn out to be a fun way to play the more complicated games.<\/p>\n Now I use the CGC controller adapter from Joe Fisher at Shiny Technologies. See the main Frinkiac 7 page for more info about that.<\/p>\n I also put two spinners on the panel for the Atari 2600 emulator and for dual spinner games within MAME. I made those two spinners by following directions I found on a website. It detailed how to make spinners using the interior of old hard drives. You can probably find it by googling around, but I’ve lost track of it now.<\/p>\n Those home-brewed spinners always seemed a bit flimsy to me. When I remade the 2 player panel for the current version, I didn’t include the spinners. I still may create a dual-spinner panel at some point in the future.<\/p>\n This panel has a trackball and an original Sinistar joystick that I got off eBay. As of version 0.77, the I didn’t end up having much success with the Sinistar stick. It quickly developed problems that I wasn’t able to fix. I haven’t yet rebuilt a panel that can play Sinistar well. I’m thinking that the right solution to Sinistar is probably going to be an analog joystick instead of attempting to use a real Sinistar stick.<\/p>\n The arrangement wasn’t very good either. Having the trackball non-centered made control of games like Centipede awkward feeling. When I rebuilt the trackball panel I didn’t attempt to make it a dual-purpose panel and just put the trackball centered on the panel.<\/p>\n The buttons were arranged such that left or right handed players were able to play without too much trouble.<\/p>\n Here are just a few pictures of the older versions of panels that really didn’t need any redesign when they got remade for the new version of the cabinet.<\/p>\n The Tron panel<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Grant](\"https:\/\/www.rickandviv.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/grantpoleposition.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe control panels<\/h2>\n
The Defender\/1 Player panel<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nThe 2 Player panel<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Trackball\/Sinistar panel<\/h3>\n
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\nMAME Analog+<\/a> variant of MAME supports the Sinistar joystick natively. Since Sinistar was one of my favorite games, and it is nearly unplayable on a normal arcade 8-way stick, I grabbed up a joystick for it.<\/p>\nMiscellaneous older panels<\/h2>\n
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