Control Panel Artwork

So some progress has been made.

The theme has been thought through and the CP art has come along quite nicely.

This has been designed using Adobe Illustrator CS2 (a vector based design program).

I wanted to try and capture the look a feel of a comic but without taking away from the fact that this is an arcade machine. I also wanted it to be easy for people to use so having dedicated buttons to perform different tasks was a must.

The top section will represent the admin side of things. In the centre are the main admin buttons which will be pause, exit, volume and a toggle button. In between the pause/exit buttons and volume/toggle buttons will be a spinner (dead centre at the the top).

As you may see there are some button labels on the CP already, but there will be more to come. Just needs some tweeks.

On the each side at the top will be the player start button (P1 and P2), the coin buttons (Coin 1 and Coin 2) and the the dedictaed mouse buttons for the trackball and spinner (right click and left click).

Below all that will be a 6 button layout for each player. I have opted to go with red ball tops with chrome shafts (Mag-Stik Plus available from Ultimarc) for the joysticks as I already had these although I would recommend using the Ultra-stick 360's as these are awesome.

In the centre will be a Happ 3" trackball in translucent red and will be illuminated using LED Clusters. These just run of the PC power using 4-pin connector and will light up the trackball. The benefit of this is that the LED's will only be on when the PC is running.

More images and art to come soon!