Almost all of the buttons on the arcade cabinet will be illuminated, to show which are used in a given game and to differentiate them. There are 33 RGB illuminated UltraLUX chrome buttons, and four red ones for “credits”.  The switches and everything showed up the other day, so I went ahead and played around with the hardware.

I’m using two controllers for them — you need three LED controller channels per RGB LED, which means I need 99 outputs to control the buttons, and four more for the credit buttons. I also need three for the trackball, so without doing anything else to the cabinet in the future, I need 106 LED outputs.

I haven’t been able to find any controllers that handle that many, so I had to go with two. The iPac Ultimate IO has 96 outputs, so it gets me pretty close. Its a bit overkill, but I went with a matching PACLed64 controller. That gives me 160 outputs, so I have a lot of spares in case I want to light up the room like a disco or something.

Both are 8-bit channels, so it gives me 16 million colors to choose from on the RGB LEDs.

As an experiment, I plugged in one of the buttons to the controller. (I was largely just verifying I knew how they went together and looking for any concerns about assembling them later.)

They’re very bright, but thankfully they can be dimmed. I went with a chrome surround to give them a little pop when the cabinet is turned off.

The Push for Credit buttons aren’t quite so interesting, but are still pretty cool. Not all games will use them, but when a game does, it’ll light them up.