Originally, I had planned to make an arcade cabinet that would have multiple control panels that were interchangeable. In order to save money, I kept the keyboard and mouse emulator electronics outside the control panel so that I could reuse the same hardware for all panels. This necessitated bring all 62 switch wires and 10 analog signal wires out the back of the control panel and to the electronics. These 72 wires were realized using 9 ethernet cables wire-tied together in a big bundle. The electronics sat (in leiu of an actual cabinet) on a 16" piece of 2x8. The whole thing was bulky and ugly, and the electronics were not protected from casual damage or cat attack. I spent a good portion of yesterday rectifying this problem.

I've decided that the likelihood of my actually creating a second control panel (or even a cabinet at this rate) are very small, so I went ahead and rewired the guts of the control panel to integrate the electronics inside. Now the only wires that come out the back are the PS2 keyboard cable, PS2 mouse cable, a PS2 keyboard passthru input, and a DB9 programming cable for the keyboard emulator. No board, no exposed electronics, much better. In the photo above I pulled back the 50pin ribbon cables that go from the keyboard emulator to the breakout boards so that you can see what is normally beneath them.

I still need to build the illuminator for the trackball, but now I have a 5V power source inside the panel and won't have to run another cable. I'm tempted to replace the grommetted hole in the back with panel-mount connections for the four cables, but there's no great need for this yet.