Section 4
Disaster and destiny.

Well, disaster struck.  The computer crashed, big time.  Partly my fault, I enabled DMA on the CD ROM.  I thought I used to use it with DMA on, but it seems I didn't.  Not only that, there were a few things that bothered me about the computer I had installed, not least of which being that the darn thing was as slow as a bloody slow thing moving very slowly.  Sometimes it didn't power up either.

But good fortune came my way, I suddenly found myself the proud owner of an AMD Athlon 1600+ processor and a 30 gigbyte hard drive.  Funny how things work out isn't it?  I already had a motherboard that would take the processor, so I ripped the old crappy system out and shoved this new one in.

Here's the new computer, much better than the old one.		Formatting the new hard drive.

There's a seperate section about the construction of the control panel.  This was probably the most tiresome, soul destroying, tedious, fiddly job of the lot and it severely made my brain hurt.  But it worked.  Here's a couple of shots of it.

The panel in position...		....and removed.

You see, I wanted the panel removable so that I could unplug it and swap it for a different control system for different games that may require it.  For example, Battlezone needs two joysticks that only move forward and back, one of which has a fire button on top.  A driving game would be better with a steering wheel than a joystick, a motorbike game could have handlebars.  You get the idea.  Basically, I didn't want it looking like the one in this next picture.

Ok, so I have exaggerated the size of the control panel, but that's how they look to me.  I never saw one like that in any arcade I went in in the 70s and 80s.