I was heading to lunch and saw a car in front of me that had Hawaii plates!! I was like, “How in the F??” That’s some Ferry Ride!!
Anyhoo, if you’ve never seen one before here ya go! It’s a little obscured by their lame license plate frame… but somethin’ is better than nothin’
I just downloaded the WordPress app for my iPhone. This seems like a pretty cool idea for on-the-go blogging. Time will tell if it works quickly enough on my 2G iPhone.
Here’s some pictures of Malachi over the last week. He’s been really getting into going to the playground and doing fun stuff (like a kid should!)
This was the Prairie Fest Parade in Oswego we went to on Father’s Day.
Here’s Malachi with his metal detector. He didn’t find anything this day, but he knows how to push this baby around and locate treasure!
Malachi on the swing. He likes to go so high that the swing buckles on the chains and he floats out of his seat! Then on the way down his head snaps back due to the g-forces whipping him back up. I follow his head now on the down stroke to cradle it if he loses control. I swear this kid is going to be a jet pilot or something. He really has no fear of heights or speed.
This one was taken yesterday at my company work picnic. Malachi found someone’s Dora The Explorer diaper bag under a picnic table and he immediately laid down on it on and pretended to be sleeping. Then when I went to take a picture he wouldn’t just pretend to sleep anymore, he had to be a little cheeser and give me a really good picture 
Hope you enjoyed. Time for some coffee!
So I haven’t posted here in forever! I was trying to move my blog to my website so that I could customize it and insert audio and picture galleries the way I wanted to. In the process I was customizing one of the templates to be pretty cool, unfortunately it was loading very slowly because the template was just too bloated. After I realized this I had already posted there a few times in preparation of releasing some new views into my world… but then my hosting company had to go and upgrade all of their servers giving customers BETTER service. Well, that may sound good, but it sucked! ALL of my websites had crashed and needed to be restored. In the process my SQL databases were funked and anything that required one was permanently toast - this included the blog among other things. Well at this point I had put A LOT of work into that blog and I just didn’t have the strength to fix it yet. When I get everything moved away from that hosting company to my new one, it will motivate me to cut over again. Just before it crashed I had fixed the template up so that it would load fast. Everything was going well…. bah!
A couple things you might not know after so long. I got a XBOX360 Guitar Hero 2 and 3, 2 wireless guitars and the new Grand Theft Auto IV game… not necessarily all at once either. I quickly became the Guitar Hero beating EASY mode, MEDIUM mode, and 5 songs from beating HARD mode on Guitar Hero 3. I got 2 for some new songs and haven’t started it yet really. GTA4 kicks ass but it’s so violent and there are so much swearing in the game that I have to play when Malachi is not around (hard to do when I have other hobbies too)
So, I’m still into Donkey Kong but have been waiting to get my garage cleared out before I can really start fixing her up. Gotta buy that shed first and we are going to be doing more home improvements this year as well hopefully.
Michelle got a Nintendo Wii and I got her Mario Kart and an extra steering wheel for Mother’s day. It is a lot of fun, but I really like the 360 too.
My little sister Korina started little league softball so I’ve been trying to go to the games for support and to test out my new camera shooting moving things! So far the shots are not the best, but I did catch some cool ones. Actually, the one I want to frame is one I took with my iPhone! I got a new smaller bag for my camera that helps me take it to tight places like the museum or the zoo or a ballgame. I still need a good tripod though.
My newest OBSESSION and part time hobby is Metal Detecting! I will repost two threads that I’ve posted on Treasurenet.com’s forums in my next older two posts. So when you read this, go back and read my last two posts here. It should sum it all up for you really good!
READ SECOND: http://16bitmicro.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/bling-bling-silver-ring-son/
I’m up now sort of, coffee is ready… this is all for now! See you soon
Posted at: http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,158374.html
This is the first metal detecting post, read this one next: http://16bitmicro.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/bling-bling-silver-ring-son/
Alright, this is going to be [s]kind of[/s] a long post so grab your drinks and snack packs and hunker down for a tale of family treasure fever, family treasure, amazing finds and a great day!
Let me first back track a little bit and tell the tale of a recent trip to Florida.
My younger brother lives down in Florida, serving with the US Coast Guard. He and his wife and 3 month old son came up to Illinois to visit in March. My dad had just gotten his Bounty Hunter Lonestar and he hadn’t really taken it out yet for a real hunt. So protected with coats and hats, my brother, dad and I set out to a park where we got our first metal detecting experience. We didn’t know too much about the detectors controls or how to properly swing it… it was just in our hand and we were expected to find treasure! Well 2.5 hours later we were cold and hungry, but we had each collected over a dollar in clad. This was Awexome!
Side note: Pretty much every guy’s eyes light up when you mention the word HEIST, and TREASURE is even better because you actually have a chance to experience it.
So we were all hooked on this hobby instantly. The idea of TREASURE just under our feet that we walk over every day just waiting to be located and recovered was too rad to overlook. It had to be FOUND!
My brother and I started looking at metal detectors online and based on youtube videos (most notable were Crackbadger’s and khouse’s) and reviews, the Garrett ACE 250 was the machine to get. My brother didn’t have the money and my dad already wanted an upgrade, so we grabbed two ACE 250s and my dad sent his Bounty Hunter Lonestar to my brother in FL. My dad and I were finding clad like mad with the ACE 250s and my brother found a heavy 18k gold men’s wedding band a couple days after receiving the Lonestar.
His wife and 3 month old son came up to visit with her family for 2 weeks at the end of April and he thought my dad and I might be able to come down to FL for a 4 day metal detecting extravaganza. Once we found cheap airline tickets and got the appropriate permission from our wives, the deal was sealed and our eyes were seeing piles of rings and pieces of eight.
The first day in Florida we hit a beach and recreation area and found some clad, but not as much as we thought there would be. My dad thought he would have his detector paid for the first day… well, I guess modern clothes have better stitching, people are carrying less coinage, or perhaps MD’ing in Florida might be a popular thing… maybe. We saw one other person the whole trip that was metal detecting with an ACE 250 hitting a beach at low tide, and met another fellow that just bought an ACE 250. Popular detector I guess 
That evening we were in a bay and I was eager to get in the water and start finding stuff. I turned up quite a few coins and was getting the hang of keeping the sensitivity low (2 bars) and keeping the coil slow and low. I knew the water was the place to be, but the night fell and we couldn’t see for anything. We had to stop at Walgreens and pick up some cheap LED head lights for the next few nights or we would be shut down again.
The next day we went to a nice park that was turning up a lot of clad, but the ground was super hard. In the heat, hard ground will wear you out fast! This is when I got my Ames Planter Buddy tool. That baby is still rockin’. We rested and drove out to the Keys where the sand is like dust and white as flour… well, sort of. Let me just say that the beaches we were on were super clean! I was grid searching around areas that looked like they had high traffic and could barely find any foil or pop tabs (hmm, maybe Crackbadger had been through there). Night fell and we were prepared this time with the appropriate head gear, those things rule! The breeze on the beach was perfect for detecting and the ocean surf made the scene so peaceful. Because of the far and few targets, I would turn my light off and just walk in the dark and stare up at the stars which were brilliantly lit, turning on my light whenever the detector moaned or screamed for joy. I realized later that it really is better to keep the light on and keep your head down just in case there’s something non-metal lying on top or signs of human life can direct you on a slightly different course. At around midnight, I decided I would get my feet wet and see what I could find in foot and a half of water in the ocean. This was pretty scary because if you look out into the ocean it’s pitch black, and then you look around the beach and your detecting buddies are a half mile down the beach… hardly reassuring. I got one and only one signal in 30 foot path I had walked. I had to time my retrieval with the waves that were coming in because I didn’t have waterproof headphones on and the waves were rising almost all of the way up to my control box. That and I didn’t want a face full of salt water. I managed to get the target on my second scoop, which turned out to be a 1961D penny in really nice shape. I was pretty stoked about it being the first ocean find I had made. One penny was enough… I didn’t want to be sucked out to sea on a stingray carpet ride. We regrouped and started heading out of the beach as I found a ring box on a bench. It was empty, but I thought it was a good omen. By the time we got back into town, it was 1:15am or so. I really wasn’t tired and wanted to jump in the bayside water again after some coffee and a bite to eat. After not finding much on the beach, I thought the water would separate the hardcore MD’ists from the part time retired hobby MD’ists. Everyone was reluctant to keep going through the night, but I reminded them this is what we were here for. Hunt it like you lost it! This was our full time job for 4 days… let’s do this thing!
At 2am we pulled in at the bayside beach and unloaded our gear. The wind had picked up and it was cold enough to put on sweatshirts. The cold wind was really weighing in on our decision to enter the water. We were all messing around a little bit on the beach, and my brother said, “I thought you wanted to go in the water”. I was like, “um… ok”. I tiptoe in and DAMN it was cold right by the shore, but the deeper you got the warmer it was. I was searching for about 30 mins. In front of this huge tree that I figured would bring people out partying and playing in the water. All I had to show for it was a bunch of pop tabs and maybe a penny at this point. Then I got another potential pop tab. My detector was sounding a solid nickel and I thought maybe for once this would be an actual cold hard nickel. Not even a 35% silver nickel… I’d take a crusty old sea worn broken in half 2008 nickel over a pop tab any day. I scooped the location and sure enough I had the target. I sifted out all of the silicon bits and crushed shells and peeked inside with my head light, gave it a shake and low and behold sweet sweet GOLD was shining through like a little sun was rising in my scoop. I knew right away what it was and exclaimed, “NO FU%#ING WAY!”. My brother was within an ear shot and dropped his gear bolting into the water. It was a 14K gold men’s wedding band, later weighed in at 4.0 grams. My brother was very happy for me and immediately started searching the water with me. We both could not believe what had just happened… it was very weird to keep searching for the next 5 to 10 minutes after that and continuing to pull up pop tabs and bottle tops. My dad was way down the beach so we decided to just surprise him later when we compared the clad at the end of the location hunt. I ended up having the least clad, but logically claimed, “well I guess I win then”. My dad was not seeing my logic, so then I showed him the ring box again that I found and said, “well we have to add this to my 37 cents.” He was doubtful mouthing off some sarcastic remarks but opened it to find my ring already bagged and tagged. He was dumbfounded by the find, and was searchin’ hard for gold thereafter on our trip.
This is not the ring box I found, I had to throw it away after I smelled it… uhg…
http://www.munchless.com/images/gold1.jpg (larger)
http://www.munchless.com/images/gold2.jpg (larger)
The rest of the trip was gold fever’d but we only pushed ourselves harder and found only more clad. Finding that ring did get everyone in the water though!
I can’t wait to go back and hit those beaches. Those of you who live on the beaches are very very lucky!
Back to present day. My 2 and a half year old son has really picked up on my relentless desire to hunt for treasure. He pretends that his arm and hand is a metal detector and that pretty much everything that’s his is treasure. I’ve been eyeing one of those $30 metal detectors from Harbor Freight for him, so I decided to stop on Friday and pick one up. It was really simple to figure out after having used a metal detector now, and briefly reading what the analog meter means when it swings left or right. Because it is a motionless detector, my son is able to operate it quite effectively.
We packed up the car this morning to go to the park with my son’s new metal detector, but stopped at my dad’s house to drop some stuff off and see if he and my 8 year old sister wanted to come along. They were ready to come with, but before we departed I thought we’d check out the new detector in my dad’s front yard. My sister threw two pennies out in the yard for me to find, but I had a solid signal right away that was not one of the pennies. My dad hands me a weeder and I popped up a dime like magic. All I could think was “wow, this detector is freaking cool for $30”. What a great present for a young adventurous boy or girl. My dad told me to check down by the sidewalk where he had found a few pennies. I walked down there and some coins were lying right on top of the ground but were very dirty. I just started picking them up, no sense in sweeping for those. I scanned the area and got a strong signal where there wasn’t anything lying on top. I used the weeder again and popped up several coins with the first plunge. My son and sister were helping to pick them up. I rescanned and the signal was just as strong as before… how many more coins could there be here? I popped up a few more, and a few more… and more and more. Rescanning showed I wasn’t done yet. We had found a hoard! A pirate’s booty, and it was right in my dad’s front yard. Now my son was grabbing for the detector and wanted to give it a go. This is one kid I don’t mind handing over a detector to, and it just so happens to be his! He was scanning and pointing for us to “dig! …I found treasure”, he said. We were there for about 5 minutes before my sister remembered that she and her cousin buried the coins we were digging up when she was 5 years old, which would have been in 2004. There were so many coins I could not hold all of them any more. At this point I went to my trunk and got a small trowel, my pinpointer and a pouch to put all of the coins in! My dad was telling our story to his neighbor that was looking on. The neighbor just didn’t realize why we were going nuts over a bunch of dirty pennies, dimes and nickels in the ground. My dad was telling us to cover it back up because he didn’t want his lawn tore up, but I kindly pointed to all of the bare spots and suggested using a better seed next time. The neighbor was laughing. There were so many coins that it was taking quite a while to retrieve them all, and we did really want to go to the park. So when the $30 detector and my pinpointer said there were none left we covered up the hole. Looking at the foot diameter dirty area I exclaimed, “there, that’s just how I found it”. I could not stop laughing at myself after I looked up to see my dad’s expression. We’ll have to go back over it with the ACE 250 before the grass gets replanted. Either way, it’s a hell of a hoard for anyone to find. And it just happens to be a Family Hoard! I agreed to split it with the land owner, LOL, but my sister wanted to keep it all. I guess it really is hers. I’m just hoping she let’s me keep the euro 2 cent piece that dates the hoard no later than 2004.
http://www.munchless.com/images/hoard1.jpg (larger)
http://www.munchless.com/images/hoard2.jpg (larger)
In the end there were [s]103 coins in the hole totaling $3.94[/s] plus the worth of the 2 cent euro. Make that 104 coins totaling $3.95! I just found a lost cent under the towel in my bathroom that I used to dry off the coins.
We got to the old school and park eventually and my son wanted to play on the playground rather than MD. And why would he after helping his dad dig up a hoard for over 20 minutes? We had a good time on the jungle gym stuff and the swings, all the while my dad was all over the place with his ACE 250 finding treasure. That’s ok, I was waiting patiently to get my turn in. My son eventually got his fill of the playground and was playing in the field picking dandelions for my sister, so I grabbed the $30 detector and fully extended the shaft on it for my 6’ plus lengthy body. Right away I got 3 signals in a row that were indicating ferrous (iron) and I ended up digging them just to see if the detector was working. Sure enough I was pulling up one rusty bent piece of fencing after another. They were pretty sharp so I just kept digging them building up my Karma points. The last signal I dug in that area by the baby swings was a cool blinky LED thing. The battery was toast, so I tried powering it up at home with my benchtop power supply and apparently 5V was too much for it… it lit up and smoked almost instantly. Ooops, no more blinky thing. You would think being an electronic engineer, I would not damage electronics like that. Well you’d be wrong because sometimes we engineers just hook S#%$ up like the next guy. Anyhoo… so we head towards my dad and sister on by the volleyball courts. My dad is going through the courts like he’s driving a dune buggy… “I’m like slow down, maybe you’ll actually find something.” He gives me some reply about the detector emitting enough of a sideways signal from the coil that it can detect coins inches away as he speeds past like there are little rodeo clowns roping in the loot from the edge of the O.K. Corral, magically. My sister proceeds to take the yellow dandelions my son gave to her and wipe them on her arm, turning it yellow. I guess I remember doing this at some point and it having some significance. At the time I was thinking… “aww, now why did you have to go and show my son that.” That’s kids for ya, gotta love em. So I start tearing up the courts with the $30 detector and the small coil is hitting all of the footprint impressions like they are huge swells in the ocean and the coil is a little sailboat just trying to stay afloat. You have to ride the surface with the cheap detector because apparently the saying is true, the more you pay the deeper you go. A nickel air tested was about 2+ inches away from the coil, not bad I think. So I found a non-ferrous signal and called my son over to dig it. He was only a little excited to see a penny, but hey… the hoard was still trumping it. He was pretty much done detecting and digging for the day so I decided to give my dad a little competition in his unchallenged world, and went and grabbed my ACE 250 out of the trunk. I started going up the length of grass parallel to the volleyball court, and as usual here comes my dad from nowhere swooping in on the “path” I’m heading down. He was coming at me from the opposite end. He dug a dime or penny or something on the opposite end of the court, did some more scanning and left for another area. I just kept inching forward overlapping my swings and hugging the grass with my coil. I had the sensitivity set to 3 because I really just didn’t feel like having any false signals or digging very deep. A couple-few inches was fine by me. Eventually I got to the end where my dad had dug his last hole and I had another dime signal, very strong pinpoint sounding like a coin in size. I pinpointed it with my probe as usual so as not to scratch it, to verify the ACE pinpoint was spot on as usual and to make sure my hole was nothing more than just a small tuft of turf that got flipped up. Well this was pretty much the only hole that I was off to the left too much. I popped the 1″ flap and there was nothing there… scanned the hole with the pinpointer and found I needed to move over an inch to the right. This time when I popped it up, the probe said it was in the clump I popped up. I broke off some of the sandy dirt at the bottom of the small clump and plain as day there was a thick silver men’s ring still trapped in the clump that remained. I immediately got this huge grin and stood up, walked straight to my car and got my iPhone so that I could come back and take a picture. On the way back I passed my dad who was underway digging a target. I said, “you might wanna stop doing that and come over here and check this out”. He replied, “But I’ve got a penny here!” To which I replied, “Leave it, there’s a pretty good reason why I had to go back to my car to get my iPhone to take a picture.” I harvested the ring, not wiping it off for fear of scratching it and let everyone have a turn holding it gently. My dad was going on about how he was right there and didn’t dig that signal because he thought it was a pop can. I was like, “It was clearly a dime signal for me”. He had his sensitivity MAXED out though so it was throwing off the detector big time for surface stuff. He was looking for those really deep silver targets, little did he know that they might only be 2” down. My sister was really itching to use the metal detector after seeing that ring in the ground and then holding it in her hand. We put our detectors by the holes we dug so that I could take a picture to show just how close our holes were. I guess it literally pays to dig all signals.
http://www.munchless.com/images/silver0.jpg (larger)
http://www.munchless.com/images/silver1.jpg (larger)
http://www.munchless.com/images/silver2.jpg (larger)
After I cleaned the ring I realized that the thinner outer part of the ring is loose and spins around the center part. What a wicked cool ring!
http://www.munchless.com/images/silver_lesson.jpg (larger)
All in all this was a GREAT day! Nothing puts a smile on your face more than the family coming together for a beautiful day at the park, playing and having a blast digging up treasure!
If you’ve made it this far, please give yourself a pat on the back AND a high five. It’s taken me about 5 hours to type this up, taking breaks here and there, not to mention getting everything washed and taken pictures of, and it’s not even Saturday anymore. Please take your empty drink containers and snack pack wrappers to the nearest recycling bin and smile if you’ve enjoyed your time reading and looking.
HH
RootMaster
Posted at: http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,159416.0.html
Read my first metal detecting blog post here before reading this one: http://16bitmicro.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/hoard-found-with-30-detector-ace-250-n-silver-ring-gold-ring-from-fl/
I met my dad at a park on the way home from work today for a little treasure hunting. He was just telling me how hot this place was and just where to go to find the loot. When we got there he went off in a different direction than where he told me the loot was, so naturally I’m thinking he already cleaned it out and reburied all of the pull tabs for me I’m thinking all of this as I’m heading toward the supposedly hot basketball court he mentioned. As I’m moving along the fence surrounding the tennis courts on the way to the BBall court, I’m pulling a lot of trash out of the ground. I’m basically digging everything I get a solid pinpoint on because I know one of these times it’s going to be something good. At this point, I’ve got two pennies and enough can slaw in my bag to create a TIN CAN BIPLANE COMPLETE WITH LINCOLN LANDING GEAR! - so naturally I was starting to get discouraged. I had about 20 minutes left before I had to be home. I got desperate and discriminated out everything except nickels, dimes and quarters. I said screw the BBall court and looked around for a place where most people wouldn’t go MDing. Spotting a ragged bush to my left I started to make a SLOW left turn. There were still plenty of signals naturally as can slaw will ring as nickels all day long - can’t pass up those gold rings though! Anyhoo, here’s the slow left turn I made… read this picture from right to left (left turn):
http://www.munchless.com/images/3rd_ring1.jpg (larger)
So at this point in the picture I got this QUARTER signal that was repeatable but I had to swing pretty far away and come back to get the DING tone. When pinpointing the whole area was hot so my first thought was POP CAN, but the hot area was way bigger than a pop can. I was trying to figure out just where the quarter tone was coming in at, and pinpointing in that area was impossible. I was pretty sure there were just way too many targets (TRASH) around the loot, so I tried a little makeshift SNIPER trick by raising the coil off the ground a little bit and using the “point” of the magnetic field to find the “quarter”. I had an idea now of just where it was… there was definitely something larger among all of the trash signals. Dropping the ACE I scooped up my pinpointer and located what seemed like a 1.5” target the size of a coin. I looked over at my bag and thought, “knife or digger tool, knife or digger tool?” The target was not right under the surface so I chose digger tool. I plunged it in about 1.5” away from the center of the pinpoint and popped it! The picture below was EXACTLY what I saw when I popped it. Refocusing on the shiny thing I first thought “class ring”, but it kind of looked like a class ring with no gem in the top. I reached for my iPhone and snapped some pictures, called my dad over once again to check out my treasure. Right away he was trying to figure out how it was his… he was sure he had been through there before too. My dad really knows how to build up my self confidence, right? Passing up all of those ring signals and just leaving them for me to find. Thanks Dad!!!!
Check it:
http://www.munchless.com/images/3rd_ring2.jpg (larger)
http://www.munchless.com/images/3rd_ring3.jpg (larger)
Bling Bling Silver Ring Son! Money Money Money!!!!
http://www.munchless.com/images/3rd_ring4.jpg (larger)
No jewels, but that dolla sign does all the blingin’
I just went through $400 in halves from the bank and got skunked (no silver), so this was a real pick-me-up!
Gaze upon my new acquisition! I just won an auction tonight and will pick up this beauty the day after xmas. It’s only an hour drive so it will be a piece of cake.
I plan on converting this Donkey Kong 3 machine into a Donkey Kong (1) machine. This is actually a DK jr. machine with DK3 badging and circuitry. I’ll be painting it baby DK blue and restoring pieces as I go, and replacing all of the DK3 artwork and circuitry with original and reproduction Donkey Kong parts.
I’ll post a bunch of new pics later of the Lionel train set I put up this morning. It’s the coolest thing ever. If you don’t have a sweet train under your tree, you are really missing out!
So I went to [Star Worlds Arcade] again on Sunday with Jay. We were there for about 2 and a half hours and I still only went through about 13 tokens, committing barrel suicide about 3 or 4 times. I still have 7 tokens from the first $5 I spent last Friday there. You can really stretch out your money if you practice and get good at a particular arcade game. I was doing alright with Donkey Kong, but I didn’t even break my high score at Star Worlds which is only 83,100 if you remember (verses my all time high of 102,900). I played the sped-up Pacman and Ms. Pacman and even Baby Packman, but they couldn’t hold my interest like DK. A bunch of games were partially working, and others weren’t working at all. I guess I expected more from a dedicated classic arcade, but I won’t let it keep me from going back because DK works fine. The screen of DK is a little blurry, but still fine enough to play. So after a while I was like, “hey, I can’t wait to get back to my house so we can finish building our MAME controllers and play Mortal Kombat”. We left the arcade, starving and driving through downtown Dekalb looking for a place to eat. Right as we found a good Irish Bar and Grill I got a call from Michelle wondering if I had put the baby gate on the outside of the bedroom door. I was confused because that’s what I always do to keep Malachi from leaving the room while we are asleep and getting into trouble. It’s complicated, but I recently installed a lever-lock child tamper resistant thingy on the inside of the door to not have to use the baby gate on the outside of the door anymore and due to habit I put the gate on the door. Long story short, I had locked them in the room! So we had to drive back home right away to free them. Eventually we all went out to lunch/dinner at TGI Fridays, and after a meltdown by Malachi we all got fed and were happy.
Back at the house Jay and I got to work on the controllers, working side by side at my workbench. It was just like old times, hacking and developing with electronics for some cool purpose.
The following is a series of pictures of both of our controllers. They both use a wireless 2.4GHz PC game controller as the internals.
Jay used a 6×9 DIY speaker box for his enclosure. If you notice, he has more buttons on top… laid out specifically for Mortal Kombat, and it really REALLY helps! That and the 8-way joystick he has basically kills my 4-way and 4 buttons in Mortal Kombat, but it’s ok because I specifically built my controller for 4-way games like Donkey Kong and Pacman.
My next project is going to be the control panel for my homebrew MAME arcade cabinet. I figure if I make the two-player 8-way control panel with at least 6 buttons for each player first, I can enjoy 2 player MAME action the whole time I’m building the rest of the cabinet. I will probably put a one player 4-way joystick and a couple buttons in the center of the control panel for older games. Here’s a picture of what this could look like:
Will it look that good? Probably not… but then again, if I wanted it to it could look better 
There are other creative ways to make things look “amazing”. Being realistic though, my garage is not a woodworking shop, and I don’t really want to spend forever on it.
See more shots here:
[http://www.knievelkustoms.com/arcademania.htm]
I don’t think I would slant the 6-button layout like that, but I think you get the idea.
Now I just need a heater for the garage
EDIT: Apparently I still need to work the kinks out of my newly created Photoshop Action that turns the images into cool photographs. It successfully takes any size image and always makes it the same width and puts the same amount of drop shadow on each, but now they are too big for the page and the right side is getting clipped. Oh bother.
I finally went to [Star Worlds Arcade] again and they were open! For the record, I guess that first time I went they were closed unexpectedly and abruptly for some emergency, but every other time I’ve called and got no answer they were just busy. So basically I’ve been VERY unlucky for a couple weeks now. So I just drove out there Friday night after work. It took about 25 minutes from work, which is about the same amount of time to go home. Home? Arcade? Home? Arcade? … Well every once in a while the answer there is going to be the arcade! No I’m not obsessed, just looking to have some fun every now and then. I really am bored most of the time, so the arcade is a good change. Especially NEW arcades that I’ve never been to.
Anyhoo, Star Worlds is great! As soon as you walk in you are surrounded buy arcade machines. The building is fairly small, but they cram in a ton of machines. It was kind of dimly lit and I was the only one there, so I started looking around at the machines in a stupor. Then the owner came out of nowhere and I established my desire to play Donkey Kong! He was like, “so you’re the guy that I’ve talked to a couple times”. Then he went into the second room and had to turn on all of the machines (save power if no one is there I guess). I bought my $5 worth of star worlds tokens (30), and went to town on DK. They have stools there that are a little shorter than I’m use to, but they worked fine. My first game I scored 67,900 and I struggled to even beat that the rest of the 9 games I played. My last game I triumphed with a score of 83,100. This is only my 3rd highest score ever, but now the new high score for DK at Star Worlds! They have a score board and keep the high scores from the machines logged. The previous high score there was only 55,000. They have plans to post the scores on their website after the first of the new year also. As I get better I hope to log hundreds of thousands.
The things that currently get me killed all too easily on Donkey Kong are the following:
I can get into the 55,000 point range all day long, but after that it gets difficult real fast. I must paint the fence, and wax the deck to build my strength up once again.
Sorry no pictures this time of the arcade, I had no camera with me. I’ll take some when I go back on Sunday with Jay. I wonder if Aaron would like to come with? That’s his stomping grounds.
A dedicated DK machine is fairly cheap, as compared to a MAME machine. But I think I’d rather have the MAME machine to be able to infinitely mix up the game play.
In other news, I just remembered about [Madfest] and I’m definitely going this year!! I will not forget!! Who’s coming with me??
