Asteroids arcade cabinet

Okay, here's a big one. This is a project I had been working on for about half a year back in 2006.
At about this time my videogame collection was starting to get kind of out-of-hand, I had about twenty something consoles at the time (now I'm up to 35 or so I think), and I had no place to store all my games and boxes and stuff.

The thought crossed my mind to create an arcade cabinet that could store my television and have storage space for all my games and boxes etc.
Initially my plan was to make a Donkey Kong or a centipede cabinet because I liked the sideart on those cabs, in the end I ended up deciding on Asteroids, I don't know why, I think I just liked the shape of that cabinet more.

Anyway, here is the final result (actually it's not finished, I've been meaning to buy some glass doors to put on the bottom front there.):



And here are the progress shots (I kind of wish I had taken more photos as I went, its pretty interesting to look back and see how you made stuff step by step):

Here is before it was painted, I wish I had taken more photos of how I actually built it.
Below is the shelf thing I made for inside the cabinet, it stores 64 carts, NES carts, megadrive carts, master system carts, CD cases , nes boxes, megadrive boxes, 2600 boxes, and DVD cases.
It also swings out to reveal a cavity behind it for storing spare controllers and consoles and console boxes.


Here is the progress painting it:











Here is how the shelf thing works, and you can see all the console boxes stacked tetris-style behind it:
SWING!

I've made sure to take a lot more photos on the progress for the current project I'm working on, so stay tuned, I'll probably do post on it as I go and how I've solve some of the problems the arise.



.....Awesome.

Maya Live motion tracking, holy crap awesome!

Yesterday morning I was browsing through the maya help files when I came across something interesting; Maya Live.
It's a basically a fairly-easy-to-get-the-hang-of 3D motion tracking plugin for Maya.
Why the fook isn't there more stuff on this on the internet!? No tutorials, barely any documentation.
Luckily the Maya help files are actually really useful in this instance.

Anyway, after only half an hour of fiddling around and some rough tracking, I was a able to produce this;



The model is just an unfinished enzo ferrari I've been modelling for a while (haven't had the chance to work on it in ages though), I'll post some finished renders when I'm done, no doubt motion tracked to some live background footage. Awesome.

Awesome Portable arcade controller

Okay this is my first real post, I can't decide how to start posting on here, so I might as well just jump straight into it. Hopefully in the future I will be posting a whole lot more projects like this, as well as well as some digital media projects like motion graphics and stuff.

Anyway, a while ago I discovered MAME, if you don't know what it is, check it out....now foo!
I got the sudden urge to create a more authentic arcade control scheme to play my favourite games on; the Metal Slug series.
At this time I was also in the process of building a replica Asteroids arcade cabinet (more on that in the next post!) so I had some leftover MDF.

Anyway after a bit of fiddling around with nails and glue, I ended up with this:


And some progress shots!:
This is before it was painted. Awesome.

Here are the innards of the sucker. I got one of the joysticks from the friendly maintainance guy at my local Playtime.

I ordered most of the buttons from this arcade distributor in Western Australia or something, they were pretty cheap. Awesome.
To get the controls to actually interface with my computer, I initially tried hacking an old keyboard I got off a friend, this worked pretty well, except the keyboard button matrix thing caused some annoying key lockout problems (where if you press certain keys simultaneously, they don't register).

A few weeks later however, I was walking past a Dodo store (remember them, they were the most pointless, useless stores evar.) And they just so happened to have these nice dual playstation controller USB things, where it plugs into 1 usb port on your computer, but it has two controllers connected to it.
I was able to rewire them with to the 9-pin ports so my arcade controller would plug into them, and it shows up as two generic 8button 4way controllers on the computer, so the buttons can be assigned easily for any MAME game.

I also rewired a NES controller, a SNES controller and a Megadrive controller so I can use them on emulators for games that are too hard to find in cart form (no I don't condone piracy).