More work on the Galaga cab...

 I ordered a control panel last week from ArcadeShop.com. I priced it out, and I really would've saved about $20 or so if I pieced everything out (metal control panel, joystick, buttons, etc.), but I opted to just order a fully populated control panel, so there was just a few things that I needed to do to the control panel when I got it...plus I was pricing the parts out on the cheap, so lord knows how bad the buttons or joystick would've really been if I went that route.

Anyway, one week later, it arrived.

It was REALLY tight trying to get it into the cabinet. So tight that after I literally slapped it into the cabinet, it took some finagling to get it out. But it looks very nice in there.

So there was some work that I needed to do to it before I could functionally use it in the cab.

First thing I needed to do was to rewire the harness. It had a 12 pin MOLEX harness already wired in, similar to what was already in the Galaga cab originally. I had to cut this connector off.

Not gonna lie, this kinda hurt. I was more worried about warranty on the control panel, but I figured that I could easily redo...everything...on the control panel if I needed to.

At this point, I just ended up stripping and crimping on new connectors to work with what I already had set up for the JAMMA harness when I cleaned it up.

This is what I rewired it to. The 9 pin is for the main controls, the 3 pin is for the start buttons. There was 3 wires that were the same color, so I had to bust out the multimeter to figure out what red wire went to which switch. This was a 30 minute job (would've been shorter, but I was watching some stuff on YouTube at the same time) to get it all stripped and pinned.

I was too eager to find out if it worked or not to wait for the morning, so I just took it to the garage-cade and hooked it all up. I set the 60 in 1 to test mode and turned the cab on. Happy to say that all switches worked in the test mode! So I switched on more games to play and changed their DIP switch settings (Ms. Pac-man Speed boost!), turned the power off, turned off test mode, and switched it back on.

Again, happy to say that everything works! I got to play a few rounds of Ms. Pac-man and Xevious before powering it down for the night...I gotta remember to take my phone with me to take pics...

The only control panel thing left to do is get the wire the trackball to the harness. There's 2 ways of doing it: Wire it to player 2 controls on the JAMMA harness or get another harness that plugs directly into the 60 in 1 board...I think this time, I'll save and wire it up to player 2 on the JAMMA harness.