Punch-Out 25th Anniversary Beginnings

So what the heck was that first post? Well it was just a quick step back in time to when I was twelve and the local arcade and Nintendo Entertainment System were flourishing.

After learning about the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and perusing arcade cabinets other people built from scratch, my first inclination was to recreate the look and feel of that old Punch-Out!! cabinet that sat in the back of my local arcade and many other arcades across the nation. Looking back now that I've finished it, if I were going to build it again, I think I would have put just a little more time into making it look like the original Nintendo cabinet. That said, it looks very close in some ways, and it's more of a Punch-Out!! style cabinet than a reproduction. Instead of just playing Punch-Out it also serves as a machine that can play thousands of different different games and has a 3" trackball along with joysticks for two players with six buttons for each. The control panel is rather wide, about 28" to better accomodate two players standing side by side.

I decided to pay homage to Punch-Out!! and Nintendo in general by labeling the machine "Punch-Out!! 25th Anniversary Edition." The actual 25th anniversary of Punch-Out isn't until 2009, but hey, I'll be ready for it! I placed pictures of some rendered Nintendo characters like Samus Aran, Mario, Luigi and Link on the front of the control panel along with their 8-bit pixellized counterparts -to show how far video games have advanced graphics-wise since the days of NES and local arcades. Getting these nice graphics on the machine was easy because of mamemarquees.com, but I will get to that part later.

Unfortunately I didn't document the building process of this cabinet very well. That is something I wish to do better with my next projects.

First, I needed material to build a cabinet housing with. Usually they are made of MDF, Particle Board or Plywood... so I had some cheesy ol' Sauder furniture (hey I won't lie, I still have Sauder furniture that I actually use, but I will admit that a lot of it is indeed cheesy) lying around that I used for sides of the cabinet and such. I made up a plan for the height, width etc. and cut them up, screwed and glued with Titebond III. Soon I had something like this below which I fitted with a 25" Magnavox TV and my old Dell 4550 Pentium IV 2.4 ghz computer. The speakers you see are Bazooka 4" car speakers. I simply ripped the left and right speakers off a Creative 2.1 PC speaker system (with subwoofer) and hooked the Bazooka 8ohm speakers up to it instead. The result was amazing, much more powerful and clear than the pc speakers.

Additionally, I found a 12" lcd on eBay for a rather cheap price. I wanted this because the developers of M.A.M.E. enabled dual screen support so a game like Punch-Out!! can utilize both screens just like the arcade version. It arrived with no dead pixels yet the viewing angles are rather poor and it only does 640x480 resolution. That might matter if you were using it in some other way, but for this project it is perfect since you can't really view it from the sides plus 640x480 is exactly the resolution I wanted. A normal TV will use that resolution while being fed from a PC graphics card with TV-Out. Classic arcade aficionados would probably opt for real arcade monitors which can be expensive, but I've found 640x480 works nicely for me and the extra large TV screen is especially good for two players.
to be continued...

Control Panel

I made the control panel from the same kind of cheesy Sauder 5/8" mdf/particle board. I found a template on the net for the button spacing. The buttons have about 1/8" inch inbetween them and the buttons are spaced about 3.5" inches from the joystick. I used a 1 1/8" spade drill bit to make the holes for the buttons and the joystick.

For the uninitiated, the way the MAME control panel works is that it acts as a "keyboard" sending commands to the computer, but through button presses and joysticks instead of keys. For a while, one had to hack a keyboard for this purpose. These days though, there are a few companies such as Ultimarc and Groovy Game Gear that create small encoders that help make wiring buttons up and configuring them very, very easy. For this project I used an Ultimarc "MiniPac Opti" that came with a wiring harness and the ability to hook up a trackball to it to make things even easier. Looking back, this type of already-made package is great for the beginner, however now that I've gotten my feet wet in this hobby, I can see the advantages of doing the wiring from the encoder to the buttons yourself. Basically, it's more tedious to make the wiring yourself but you can customize the lengths and such for a very clean looking installation.

The buttons are Happs blue translucent microswitch buttons. Microswitch buttons weren't the norm back in the 80's, instead they often used leaf switches. Leaf switches are quieter, and there's more of a plastic "tap" sound than the "click" you get when you press microswitch buttons. I prefer leafswitches because I remember that hollow, plastic tapping sound from when I was younger. I'm using microswitch buttons here but with leafswitch brackets from Rollie Eelectronics that are made to convert todays more common micro's to leafs.

For the joysticks, I decided to splurge a bit and get Ultimarc's Ultrastik 360's. These are really great joysticks that are programmable. In the arcades, joysticks were usually fixed at 2 way, 4 way, 8 way, 49 way or even anaolog. There are some joysticks you can buy that may be switched from 4 to 8 way and such, but the Ultrastiks can be mapped through software to emulate a 4, 8, 49 way or even anolog etc. I also purchased the circle restrictor plates that lessen the "throw" of the sticks so they move in a tighter circle. These sticks are smooth as butter with the default light spring and playing arcade games or any console emulators is excellent. You can even create customized joystick maps for certain games.

The arcade version of Punch-Out!! had a "K.O." button you could slam for big hooks and uppercuts when the punching power meter filled up. I decided to try and recreate this with a mushroom switch button from . I even managed to get a blue translucent one to go with the buttons. It wasn't cheap, but I had to have it. I then purchased a blue translucent trackball, cut into the control panel to accomodate it and routed out an area for the top trackball plate to sit flush on the control panel.

The reason I chose translucent buttons and a trackball is to light them up with leds. I first tried an unorthodox method of lighting them by using 12 volt 4 head leds strung up in parallel from the computer's power supply. I figured I would shoot the light from each of the leds up into the buttons for a nice effect. Well the effect was nice, but stringing up all those somewhat large leds and trying to position them just so was a huge pain in the ass, especially with everything else going on under the control panel. So I scrapped that and...

I noticed another member from the arcadecontrols.com forum using Groovy Game Gear's "Button Blaster" leds with great success. This method proved much easier, although I had to modify the leafswitch brackets by cutting part of them off and drilling a 3/16" hole in the buttons for each led. I then soldered the leds in parallel with resistors to the computer's power supply.