Wall Candy! Real-time development retrospective.

In yesterday’s post I described the 9 step process by which I created the Wall Candy MAME arcade cabinet. It is only an 9 step process in retrospect however. It was originally far lengthier, requiring engineering, exasperation, experimentation: in short, iteration. In this post I’m linking to its development blog, a thread in the arcadecontrols.com forums. Note that a lot of the photos are 404.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=112805.0

Here’s one of those 404 photos:

Pictured is my first experiment in balsa bending. It involved creating a form in which pegs were used to make the balsa conform to the shape and curve of soup cans. The soup cans were bolted to scrap MDF, the pegs were removable. The balsa would be steamed, set in the form, and then steamed and set again. Each time the pegs would be moved in towards the form. It was material consuming, space consuming, and worst of all, extremely time consuming. It was antithetical to the project’s ethos in every way. Moreover, it didn’t work. As you can see in the photo the balsa cracked, bent, and malformed weirdly. Eventually I developed the following procedure:

In the end, video game cabinet development is very much like video game development: iterative! For that reason it took weeks to create the original cab. I imagine I could do a second cab in a day…

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