The Birth of the UBER Panel

The origins of this project go back to when my vidiot buddy Mark Schnieder and I stumbled across the MAME project on the Internet a few years ago. Being that we both hung out in Aladdin’s Castle instead of cutting grass and doing chores like responsible kids, we were in nirvana when we found out about MAME. Mark is a hardcore gamer so he could handle playing with the keyboard, but my brain is wired different and that was just too hard for me to have fun with. So MAME did not get a lot of play from me in the early days.
 

Fortunately Mark found the INTERACT PC ARCADE GAME CONTROLLER at CompUSA and I was in business. Wow, this was really great to have an arsenal of real Arcade games in my home.

Several years passed and as MAME got more popular and more great games got emulated, the old INTERACT PC ARCADE GAME CONTROLLER was showing its age. Playing any 4-way maze or ladder games was nearly impossible as the INTERACT has an 8-way joystick which makes 4-way games tough to play.  Mark and I talked about making our own control panels, but we only talked and never acted. I could only dream about what Capcom Bowling, Crystal Castles or Centipede would be like with a track ball and not a mouse. Oh my and Tempest with a real spinner, that would be very fun indeed. In the mean time I kept an eye on several Internet sites that were talking about homemade panels and still I did nothing.

Then one day I found PC2JAMMA and Build Your Own Arcade Controls FAQ and it was a long, long night of surfing the net. Buttons clicked, light bulbs flashed, and the wires in my brain suddenly connected. The BYOAC lead me to HAPP Controls which is just down the road in Chicago, IL. I spent hours on that site pricing out all the controls I wanted for my panel. After many long conversations with Mark about the ideal control panel configuration, the project was green-lighted. Since I was between jobs at the time, my office was soon filled with full size cardboard layouts of my first arcade control panel.