Here are many pieces ready to be primed.
Two coats of primer, twice sanded.
I couldn't get a precise color match off the control panel as it came back from the vinyl printers, so I bought the two closest colors I could manage, and then mixed them 50/50.
The resulting color turned out pretty good... though when wet, it was alarmingly purple.
Here's how close I got to a match on the mid grey of the control panel art.
A mockup of the center column in the final color, with the subwoofer grill and coin door art.
But that's enough paint for the moment; I had my folks up to help with the control panel...
102 wires later, here's the functionally complete underside. I may go after more bundling and more custom length runs in the future, but, it all works.
And from the top, you can't see any of it anyway.
One of the cooler things here is the trackball, buttons and joystick ball tops are all translucent white plastic, with RGB LEDs under them.
Here's how it all works together.
Note that while it looks like I've dimmed the lights in the following pictures, I have not - it's just a short camera exposure, to best capture the lit panel. The room lights are actually the same as above.
In the menus, the P1 stick is active to scroll through the games, and p1 button 1 selects a game.
When you pick a game, the marquee goes onto the top monitor, the game goes on the TV, and the control panel takes on the correct colors for that game.
Here, the traditional yellow P1 vs cyan P2 of Joust. Only the active controls light.
Missile command - trackball, and three fire buttons for the left, middle and right firebases.
1943 - player 1 is green, player 2 is orange, buttons for fire and loop.
Golden Axe - buttons are attack, jump and magic. (Incidentally, photographing this panel to look anything like it does in reality is surprisingly tricky.)
Some other games:
Major Havoc originally had a big green roller, but a trackball is a fine substitute. One player only games take the colors of the original controls where possible.
Xybots was one of the drivers of the panel design - the original had momentary contact twist sticks for rotating the view. I use the left and right buttons for this, instead.
Haven't decided which fire button makes better ergonomics here. Might retain both.
Where Missile command needs a left, middle, right button set, Gladiator needs a top, middle, bottom set. The diamond supports both in just 4 buttons.
Continue...