Game Room Remodeling Diary: Coda
Changes are afoot! As with any venture like this, there are bugs to be worked out of the system, and I’m doing my best to shake them out of the woodwork. I recently got a PSX trakball, and figured out a simple way to integrate it into my “arcade minus the cabinet” setup without having to move the big, bulky twin joystick. I simply turn a small container upside down (after washing and drying it, of course, to get any loose dust off) over some of the buttons on the twin stick, and put the trakball (a fancy little number by Nyko) on top of that. Also, I’ve found that spending more than 5 or 10 minutes standing a foot away from my monitor’s a bit hard on the eyes, so I pulled my “backup” video fader out of the box and set it up to “dim” the video a bit on a manual setting without having to mess with the monitor’s brightness control, which is set right where I want it for everything else. And here are the results of both additions, from a nice test session with Centipede. You’ll notice that the monitor’s dim enough not to flare out in the photos, which it normally would at full brightness:
Here’s a wider shot of the whole setup:
Without the upside-down container, which I used to use for newly-arrived, untested cartridges, you can see that this arrangement doesn’t mess with the twin stick buttons at all. In fact, for Centipede, I configure the game to use the player 2 joystick’s buttons for firing:
You may have noticed some “friends” on top of my monitors; I had to trade some of my “toy display” space for more useful storage space, and as such some of my toys have had to relocate to smaller, inconspicuous spaces. Some of them, like Dirk and friends here, are boldly standing guard next to the Colecovision where they’re not in the way:
(Ambassador Kosh, not seen, is on the other side of the Colecovision.) Meanwhile, others are hiding between the top of the monitors and the top of the rack:
…and others are just sitting…well, wherever I can find space for ’em:
(It may seem silly, but I’m as proud of my toy collection as I am of my game collection. Gotta have at least a few on display.)
Also added one red rope light under my PC desk, which creates an eerie little glow; I had to brightness/color-enhance the hell out of the left photo to get this to show at all:
That’s all that I’ve really done in the past couple of weeks.… Read more
