I tried out the spacing and depth of the controls and laptop/component positioning before I got started on this project, but I must admit I probably got a little lucky everything to make this work was a tight fit! It's very doable though as the case I used is pretty slim compared to most guitar cases.
On the right, is a Dell D630 laptop with the screen removed and on the left is the I-PAC4 in a plastic electronics box.
On the left is also a DC to 2A 12V DC power converter, and a 12V to 5V DC step down adapter. The 4 red LED backlit buttons I have at the front of the case to trigger coin entry came with 12V LEDs and computer fans I used also need 12V. The square buttons I used for non-game controls, such as exit, pause, save/load, and save/load position used 5V, as well as the powered USB hub.
Being a bit of a perfectionist I wanted to make sure I could do everything without opening the case. This meant somehow turning on the laptop without opening the case. I used a trick to make this happen by hooking an Arduino Pro Mini to an Ethernet shield to send the Wake On Lan magic packet to the laptop when I power on everything else. This sounds like an expensive fix, but the cost of Arduino bits and pieces has dropped to dollars with parts coming from China. This whole setup was probably about $8. And many thanks to the guy who wrote this Arduino Ethernet library to send UPD packets on the cheap ENC28J60 Ethernet chips.
I eyed these arcade light guns when building this, but thought they were pretty expensive to start with, but maybe someday! To add other controllers I pulled apart a USB hub and attached it to the side of the case.
I used a little black caulk on the outside to clean up the edges.
In goes the laptop. This one I got from an office surplus sale. It's not worth much, and old by the most standard but plenty good enough to run MAME games. I connected a VGA to HDMI adaptor to the laptop's VGA port as that's all it had for video out. The adaptor also connected to the headphone jack to send audio over HDMI. I also connected the I-PAC4, USB hub, and trackball to the laptop's USB ports.
There is probably a better way to do this, but the cheap arcade trackball I purchased was PS/2, and my laptop only had USB ports, so I needed a conversion from PS/2 to USB. Some devices allow you to connect a PS/2 to USB converter, but not this trackball, at least for the standard mouse Windows drivers I was using. I found an old IOGEAR cable in a box of old wires I had at home, originally designed to allow one keyboard and mouse control two computers, that would allow my PS/2 trackball to be converted to USB.
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