Portable Tabletop MAME Cabinet (Control Panels II)
 
Drilling the joystick and button holes is a chore. Use a test piece of MDF wood for this, to make sure that you like the feel of the distance between the joysticks and buttons. As you can see from my pencil scribbles below, it took quite some time for me to find the spacing that I liked.
 
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Here are the guidelines that I finally settled on, after testing out several configurations:
 
•    The center of the player start buttons are 1.25 inches down from the top, and 1.5 inches from the side. On the wide control panel, they are placed at the outer corners. The left player will be Player 3 and the right player will be Player 4. On the two end control panels, they are places at the corners closest to the wide control panel. This becomes important later when Player 3 becomes Player 1 in a horizontal game, and Player 4 becomes Player 2.
•    The joystick and fire buttons are on a horizontal line that is vertically centered, or slightly below vertical center. I chose slightly below.
•    For player 3, the center of the joysticks are 3 inches from the left side of the panel.
•    For player 4, the center of the rightmost fire button is 3 inches from the right side of the panel.
•    The distance between the two pushbuttons is always 1.75 inches.
•    The distance between a joystick and a pushbutton is always 2.5 inches.
 
Check with the manufacturer to determine the size of the holes that you should drill for the joysticks and pushbuttons. With the HAPP controls that I ordered, I used:
•    A 1 1/8 inch spade bit to drill the holes for the pushbuttons
•    A 1 ¼ inch spade bit to drill the holes for the miniature joysticks.
At this point, go ahead and attach the joysticks and pushbuttons to test them out. Note that I had to remove the contacts from the joysticks and pushbuttons to be able to screw them. If you like it, you're all set to start spray-painting.
 
Here is the bottom side of one of the smaller control panels after mounting the joystick and pushbuttons.
 
Here is the wide control panel.