I've moved things around in my office recently and I've put my MX7000 under my desk to free up some room. I don't have a lot of spare room on my desk for consoles and I got a bit tired of having to keep shuffling them around so I made a rack to utilise the vertical space I have below one of my speakers.
NTSC-J Saturn + Fenrir ODE, MiSTer + Ironclad, my childhood PAL Dreamcast with chinese GDEMU 5.20 installed, NTSC-J SCPH-7000 PS2 Slim with Modbno 5 chip.
Originally I wanted to put the PS2 on the top but there wasn't enough space so I added some tabs and mounted it to the side.
I don't want or need to have them all hooked up at once but I still want to be able to hook them up easily so I made a mount for an extension cable and for a SCART coupler that's fitted to the side of my desk:
Thanks to LEGENOARYNINLIA for pointing me towards McBazel/Brook adapters. With these I can use modern wireless pads for the all the systems and I can use my Switch HRAP stick too. I might add a USB extension to go under the desk so the wire is not trailing over the top of the desk.
I took a few pictures etc whilst putting it together and I can create a bit of a build log if anyone's interested.
Thanks bud. I've not made anything from acrylic for ages so it was fun to have a play again. It's just takes (me) foreeeeever to work and polish acrylic manually by hand, that part I had forgotten! Laser would be 1000x easier/quicker..... (Soon™)
Woah, you polished all that acrylic by hand!!?? That'd try my patience to no end man. I did it once and never again. Now I just send an eps to my local acrylic shop and they laser cut it (for pretty cheap surprisingly). I'd love to get home laser cutter but proper venting makes it prohibitive. (Someday™)
Yeah I could have gotten a mate to laser cut it for me but I quite fancied getting my hands dirty again. I quite like polishing acrylic too, as long as there is not looooads of it to do.
My ultra high tech polishing setup:
With cast acrylic you can pretty much double the abrasive grades as you go up them. I get a fairly good finish from my router so I start wet sanding at 240 and this time just went to 600 > 1200 and then Novus 3 and 2 and ended up with a glass finish.
Took about 2.5 hours to do the edges on those three pieces. TBH it's probably a better finish than you would get from a laser too but I would happily trade that slight improvement over the speed increase a laser would give
It's the same process I used to use back when I made marquee holders. I would stop at 600 grit for holders that have thin edges like E2/Astro City etc etc which gave a nice frosted edge. Holders with thicker and more complex profiles/chamfers/radii got the full treatment up to Novus 2. Aero City and Capcom Q GrandAm 25 were the worst
I tried flame polishing with MAPP gas a few years ago but I wasn't very happy with the results. It does 'polish' the edges but you also lose definition at the corners/edges and also if you have a transition where a chamfer starts etc. It's also harder to get a 100% uniform finish which I'm a bit of a stickler about. Hand polishing takes longer but you're much more in control of the process and you don't lose that definition. You're also less likely to fuck up a piece you've spent a long time working before it
I'm using wireless joypads for each system but the sticks I'm using are USB. I got tired real quick of the USB cable trailing from the rack so I remade the foot thing.
The laser in the PS2 has been giving me some gyp too. I was going to replace it but thought I would look at other loading options and decided to use psx-pi-smbshare to load games from USB. I didn't really want a Pi in a box with additional cables floating around so I thought I would see if I could fit something to the top of the PS2 PSU. It was a bit of a challenge to keep everything within the footprint and whilst keeping all of the cables axial but I managed it.
I used a Pi Zero with a ethernet/USB hat and a DC>DC voltage regulator to drop the 8.5V to 5V power the Pi. 8.5V is passed through to the other side to then power the PS2.
The button is to shut down the Pi so that files are not corrupted from a hard power off. I connected the button to the GPIO pins and edited the /boot/config.txt file to suit.
To tidy some of the excess wire I made a cable tidy to go on the bottom.
I was a bit concerned about any issues with heat but I checked the PSU and Pi with a IR heat gun before and after and it's made no difference.
Laser would be 1000x easier/quicker..... (Soon™)
