A closer look at the Stepmania Cabinet

[CronoSquare]

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Basic information:

Screen: 27" Flat Screen TV
Computer: 1.7GHZ PIV w/ Radeon 9200 w/ S-video out (4)
Sound: Quest Tower Speakers w/ Technics Amplifier
Controls: All controls, including arrows, selector buttons and coin mechanism are run via an X-box DDR pad control board, (3) with the X-box plug cut off and replaced with a USB. (Apparently X-box controllers are just USB with a different head, so they can be spliced directly)
Pads: The standard 2-sensor solo system was completely replaced with a "metal to metal" system, using a piece of sheet metal raised up on plywood contacting a piece of sheet metal glued to the bottom of the plexi-glass, with each one having a wire attached. (The entire surface of the metal works as a contact area)

[cpubasic13]

You have 2 left feet. XD

Simple to make it looks, except for the Xbox DDR pad control board and the mechanics of the pad.
I'm not a wire expert, which is why it is complex to me. :P

It is a nice setup though. Perfect to run StepMania at least.

Two questions about it though, out of curiosity.

1) The control board was taken out of a DDR soft pad, right? If not, where did you get it from?
2)How do you get StepMania to run immediatley on startup?

[CronoSquare]

Originally Posted by cpubasic13

You have 2 left feet. XD

Simple to make it looks, except for the Xbox DDR pad control board and the mechanics of the pad.
I'm not a wire expert, which is why it is complex to me. :P

It is a nice setup though. Perfect to run StepMania at least.

Two questions about it though, out of curiosity.

1) The control board was taken out of a DDR soft pad, right? If not, where did you get it from?
2)How do you get StepMania to run immediatley on startup?

1) The control board is taken from an X-box soft pad. Wires have to be sautered onto the correct contact points, as you can see from the picture. (You can find the schematics for it online if you look a bit) All of the positive wires have different contact points, whereas all the negative wires go to the same point. It's a bit tricky to get the sauter to fall on just right so that it only covers 1 point at a time. Probably the job requiring the most caution/detail.

2) We set the computer to boot up automatically (when a power source is put on) and simply put Stepmania in the startup folder. The TV actually doesn't turn on automatically, and we just had someone turn it on for us at the arcade whenever they started the day, though I'm sure with a little rewiring or a switch dealie of some kind we could work out a way to make that automatically turn on too, just never got around to it. The biggest problem with this setup is that, for the convenience of the arcade runner, generally they just turn everything off at the end of the night, which means windows always wants to do scandisk/sometimes it can cause data loss, etc. in Stepmania, which is a real pain. It is possible to wire up the power button from the computer to a seperate switch that could be easily reached by the arcade owner, that would simulate pressing the power button once, which will cause Windows to shut down properly. (Still, I *believe* that exiting Stepmania improperly can still occasionally result in stepmania.ini being corrupted/deleted, which restores default settings. All in all, there are a few annoying things to take care of)