Enter the Taito Twolix: Double Diamond Black Edition

[nam9]

Time to follow up my 'Recent Purchase' post with some progress of my 2021 Pandemic Project:

So yes... this is my Taito Twolix project at about 95% completion, or at least, now fully functional!

As mentioned earlier, this was a console custom built for a shipping/offshore industry company for training purposes and would have originally taken two marine grade 4:3 LCD screens that would have been extremely costly to replace. The entire unit is made of 6mm aluminium, so it is pretty weighty, but manageable. The front access panel is secures by 22 bolts, so mindless game switching should be held to a minimum.

First up a good wash and fresh coat of enamel. Much easier than spray-painting smooth surfaces... I just used a small roller:

Then some form of mounting system for the monitors. These brackets are from a steel shelving unit...

The same brackets helped out with the front facing audio... just:

And for 'Surround Sound', some proper speakers to fill the rear 80mm fan cutouts:

Of course the real cabinet maker here is the gorgeous custom Vewlix DB styled control panel by @Rbtamanini

I cannot thank Rafael enough for taking my measurements and sketches through to a final project and even going so far as to include a template to help me align and cut the screw holes for mounting everything.

 

[nam9]

Cutting a facia was my most dreaded task, and not at all helped when my first knife cut veered off in the wrong direction...

I could only find clear acrylic, so it was necessary to spray-paint the rear with several coats of black. On the plus side, that gave me a 3mm clearcoat finish on the front...

To round off the exterior and give it added Vewlix styling, I ordered some slightly customised marquee headers from @ckong and fiddled around with mounting and lighting them...

Internally... I game myself a nice blank canvas to start with. Really happy with the control harness conduit, all the blind rivets and cable ties!

The PCB holder covers various scenarios: supporting an Atomiswave (thanks @Dreygor ), or my Jamma to JVS solution featuring a JVS Bridge by Tuson Logic:

My current build... Still a work in progress as I have plenty more cables to reroute and so on. Thankyou @skate323k137 for all your assistance getting started with the RingEdge2 pictured. Love it!
So video is handled by an Extron DVI to 2x DVI Distribution Amplifier (DA2) unit (top right above the power strip. That does exactly what you would expect and sends signal to both monitors.
The Extron RGB DVI 300 unit (bottom left) is to handle upscaling of 240p - 480i/480p content before passing to the DA2 unit (in theory at least. I haven't gone lower than HD at present).
Audio is fed to the Extron MDA 3A Distribution Amplifier unit. Currently, the left sound-bar is fed left channel audio on both L&R inputs, while the right sound-bar receives the same pseudo mono input. A third output is fed to a repurposed Dell A525 subwoofer sitting in the base, and that is connected to the rear facing speakers in pace of the original satellite speakers.
I'm not terribly knowledgeable when it comes to audio, but the front facing sound-bars both run off of 5v USB. They were more of an aesthetics choice. The rear speakers do a great job of adding some much needed weight to the sound output.

Lastly, I needed to replicate the volume adjustment controls for the rear speakers and added Coin Up, plus Test and Service buttons, accessible from beneath the main control panel:

 

[nam9]

Some parting shots:

Thanks for reading!

 

[Mrhide]

....but can you TATE them ?

 

[nam9]

If I cut another facia
Other issue is that the screens will hide the front facing speaker and the marquee to some degree. Think I’m keeping these Yoko…
Of course, if you have noted the fact that Gigawing Generations and Raiden III are both Tate titles them I’m afraid that is because those are the only marquees I had to hand