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Defender Stargate / Missile Command Mash-Up
I always wanted a panel that could play Defender
and still fancied one
that included my trackball to play Missile Command so I decided to fuse
the two designs. This is how it turned out.
 I started the design by dowloading some Defender
inspired artwork and
changing the colours to match the existing cabinet scheme.
Next I drew a circle to border the trackball. I
found an exhaust vent
for a portable air conditioner which acted as a surround. This face
plate was later spray painted with several coats of black enemel.
 As my panel is deeper than the defender CPO, I
moved the joystick and
reverse buttons up to allow room for the mini pushbuttons. I couldn't
find the Atari volcano buttons, so these would have to do.
There is very little of the Missile Command
artwork actually in this
design because the trackball is so dominant . I made what there was
slightly transparent so it wouldn't clash with the Defender art too
much. Also note the spinner semicircle on the right.
The graphics were just printed on photopaper for
play testing however
the final version was printed by MameMarquees.
 The panel is swappable using a molex connector
(the trackball uses a
serial port so I'll need a separate connector).
 My attempts at wiring an ATX connector were
terrible so I ended up
using an ATX motherboard extender. This worked fine except that the
wires weren't always wired 1:1 to the identical pins. (probably doesn't
matter for its intended purpose on a motherboard, but caused me a fair
bit of confusion).
I moved the Ipac from the underside of the
control panel to the side of
the cabinet. The board was held on by PCB feet vpurchased from Gremlin
Solution. The molex connector is permanently wired to the IPac to allow
the same PCB to be used for the two control panels.This had the added
benefit that pounding the buttons on Track & Field no longer
knocks the circuit bord free of its mounts.
 The Crayola trackball is held tight by a base
plate bolted to the top
and tightened with wingnuts. The bolts are countersunk into the panel
and need filling
 When the sticks arrived I experimented with the
height a little. This
was a little low.
 I used a spare pushbutton surround to finish the
joystick hole once I'd
found a good height, as this poor photo shows.
  The spinner on the right fits into a button
sized hole and connects to
a tiny interface board.
  This is how it looks in its cabinet. Shame the
photo is so duff, the
finish doesn't really look that bad.
 This is the side art also printed by
MAMEMARQUEES. My son drew the
kanagaroo and I traced it with a marker pen and then into a vector
format using a program called Vector Eye. I used a trial version of
Adobe Illustrator to colour in the drawing and clean up and enlarge the
image
 The whole cab!
 The original control panel also needed a molex
connector, so I took the
opportunity to tidy up the wiring. The old rats nest was causing
problems with wires working free of their terminals.
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