Marquee de Sade vs. The Ten-Thumbed Carpenter
- April 27th, 2011
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These things take time. I have recently started a new job, and while I am very happy with that, I have come to realize that spare time is more scarce than ever. For the past six months or so I have slowly but surely planned to a theme based marquee for my arcade cabinet, but planning for a couple of minutes before falling into the stupor of exhaustion every night is one thing. Taming the vector lines of Evillustrator ™ is quite another. Still, I see the marquee as pretty much done now – bar a few crooked lines. The theme is taken straight from the C64 demo Andropolis, and while some might call me lazy for not coming up with something fresh, I felt that there was still more ideas to pull out of this apocalyptic playground of the gods. So there.
Yet to come is finishing up the frontend theme – almost done there – and doing the graphics for control panel. Speaking of, I actually managed to do some woodwork in the basement the other day. I used MDF to do the control panel, and after a few trial and errors I actually managed to cut some straight lines with the shaky jigsaw. I spent quite a lot of time contemplating the button layout, and I ended up with doing a blueprint of the original six button Street Fighter arcade machine layout. According to the www experts this setup is not the most ergonomically correct positioning of the fingers, but it is definetly cooler and more hardcore retro than any of those all-over-the-place Japanese layouts. Next up is using a router to make holes for the joysticks. Another first there, so I will try to do plenty of practice on scrap wood before I do it on the real CP. Doing woodwork is good fun, but there is always something that I manage to overlook or screw up. A measurement here, a jagged line there. Still, my grandfather was a carpenter so I choose to believe that there is a carpenter in my blood as well – even if it is a ten thumbed one.




















