so it turns out that the microswitches were the problem, but not in the way that i thought. you need to have the buttons wired up so that the circuit is always open until the button is pressed. we had the wires running to the other pole, the one where the circuit is always closed. the poor ipac was sending start, button1, button2, button3, up, down, left, and right for player 1 and player 2 all at the same time. no wonder the damn thing was acting crazy! so i switched the connections and voila! we have gaming goodness. the monitor is not perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than nothing, so i’ll leave it at that and be happy. it’s got a big magnetic thing going on on the left side of the screen, i’m not sure what it is but i’m guessing a good degauss might take care of it. i’ll leave that for next week. anyway.

the only thing left to do for today is get a 1/8″ to RCA adapter to hook from the computer to the speakers in the cabinet (the cab has an amplifier! cool beans!), and we’ll have sound and video. it will be a multimediafest for the soul.

well, koz discharged the monitor last night, we rigged it up and booted it. no video. as things turn out, the monitor picks up a signal much better when the computer is actually turned on. so we got a signal, played with the monitor controls, got a good picture, and now we’re cookin’ with gas!

kurt predicted that something would, of course, be wrong with the i-pac setup. he’s so smart, i could kill him. something is sending a jillion signals per second into the ipac, making it impossible to click or type when the i-pac is plugged in. so i’ve disconnected everything and we’re going to start from zero and find where exactly it’s dying. i’m betting it’s either the not-new joysticks or one of the old microswitches that’s causing the problem. we’ll see.

anyhow, we’re almost there. stay on target… stay on target…

kurt did a lot of digging recently, and discovered that our medium res monitor is actually, in fact, an early multisync monitor! by disconnecting a set of cables from one set of pins and reconnecting them to an identical set of pins nearby, we can run our monitor at 15kHz! we tore off the back of the cabinet to see if this was indeed the case. it is! now we just need to find someone to discharge the monitor, as neither of us are really brave enough to try and attempt it ourselves. once we do, we can have a working arcade cabinet in about… 5 minutes! w00tsters!