Shannon's Blog - Awecades - more news and a confession

RSS Bot · August 25, 2006

OK seems that the hold up is the act labs gun. I went ahead and opted to have it shipped and get the act labs gun later when they come in. I have a 6 day off stretch coming up and I wanna be able to maximize that time playing around with my new toy.

Here is an excerpt from an email Curt sent me. I'm sure he won't mind. It just emphasises the ease of being able to deal with this thing.

QUOTEI would like to ship your unit to you, would you mind me shipping the Lightgun unit seperately? Its VERY simple to install, you just unplug the monitor cable from the motherboard, plug it into the interface, then the interface into the VGA port on the motherboard and then plug it into one of the free USB ports, I'll include the need tie-strap to secure it down, then just plug the lightgun through the hole in the cable and into the interface.Plug it in? No problem. I planned on checking out the guts of this thing anyways.

Apparently the spinner placement created problems with the layout so it had to be modified.

QUOTEI had to make some changes to the layout of the control panel, the spinner mech was too close to the trackball, so I moved it above the player 1 buttons area so you have more open area and freedom to use it and I moved the Player 1/2 buttons over and the Menu/Audio buttons above the Player 2 area. I think you'll be happy with the layout and the arrangement works well.No problem. I'll put pics up on the blog so people can see how it ended up. I just got to thinking though maybe I should reverse the player one and two controls. I'd really like to play games right handed. Forget player two. They can suffer. :lol:

The confession? Well that's simple. Why did I decide to get an awecade? I am not very mechanically inclined (aka putting things together, wiring, soldering, you name it). In fact I'm a total clutz. Soft-modded xbox? No problem. Kxploit on PSP? Piece of cake. Selfbooting CD's on a dreamcast? In my sleep. Backup copies on the gamecube without mod-chip. No problem. But ask me to put something together and I'm guaranteed to do some damage, if not bodily harm.

I've always kinda had my eye on those prebuilt mame cabs and the awecades is the first one that caught my eye that actually seemed affordable to me and yet still have good quality controls in it. One of the first things that my wife asked me when I mentioned it to her was... "How big is it". Uh yeah. So I guess size really DOES matter. :lol: So as you can see one of the intended designs of the awecade, normal size cabinet for those without the space, actually worked out for me.

The awecades unit is also being done by Curt Vendel. The same guy who did the Atari Flashback units. Which despite some of the drawbacks I gotta give the guy credit. To even get Atari to do as much as they did had to be tough. If only that Atari 8-bit unit had made it out the door. Yes Atari is financially inept. My second criteria was expandability. I want to be able to change the thing to play the stuff I want. Now THAT is something that I can do. Anyways there you go. An update and confession in one blog entry.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=1892