The cabinet control panel

When I first got the arcade cabinet it was accompanied with a control panel.  The control panel provided controls for two players (each player had a joystick and three buttons and there were two additional buttons to select a one or two player game).

When I originally arranged for the cabinet width to be reduced I knew there wouldn’t be enough room to include controls for two players. The finish of the control panel also didn’t look that good. As a temporary measure the area for the joystick on the left hand side of the control panel was simply cut off. As you can see from the photo the remaining joystick is slightly off centre and there are a number of holes and possibilities for a total of 8 buttons. The original Vectrex controller only had four buttons and for me the positioning of the buttons on the arcade control panel is less than ideal. I also am not very much in favour of having the joystick securing screws visible on the top surface of the control panel. Therefore, I will investigate the ideal joystick and button layout and with the intention of making a completely new control panel – I’ll cover this subject  in a future post (very soon).