I'm certain that the magnum opus of this project will reside in the front end, but from a design perspective the four paneled rotating control axle is pretty rad too. The origin for the design should be pretty obvious within the cabinet builders' community as the same used in the 1-UP's Pacmamea cabinet. However. the original concept did not fulfill my multi-player design aspirations.
My intent was to take the three sided rotation arms of his concept and apply it to a design that would support up to four simultaneous players. In order to provide each player a competitively sized patch of controller real-estate I felt compelled to choose a semi-circle controller platform. However, in the Pacmamea example, the weight of the control panel is supported by the front access door, and the flat edges of the control panel help to neatly hide the cabinet interior by doubling as exterior pieces during gameplay. In order for the semi-circular control panels to be supported in the same way, the front access door will also have to be semi-circular and the cabinet's exterior on whole will have to be cylindrical to hide the interior. A square support base would be doable, if not for it being so difficult to develop without stability issues and becoming otherwise aesthetically displeasing. I can't think of anyone who would accept an ugly illuminated wardrobe-sized eyesore into their gameroom, no matter how well it actually plays classic video games. I spent literally two days attempting to devise a way to outsmart the laws of physics in adapting 1-Up's design to my own purposes. However, physics insisted that the square peg could not fit in the round hole.
In the end, the solution was to devise a semi-circular front access door that would support the weight of the controller, lock and cradle it into position, and remain accessible enough to quickly rotate between panels. The circular design does deny me the ability to mount an authentic coin door on it, but in truth I never had a real intent on doing that anyway. That strikes me as a poor choice for this design considering it has so little in common with authentic cabinets. The cabinets I saw growing up had coin doors of course, but they did not have rotating panels, illuminated controls, support for consoles, PC compatibility, or various other etceteras. Besides, thoughts of including a coin door leaves me with anxiety about some situations. For example: imagine being on the 800th level of Gauntlet, the game is ominously reminding you that 'The Red Warrior is about to die'. You slip another coin down the slot but nothing happens... You jam your thumb three times in the coin return depressor but your system ignores you. You're now frantic. You kick the coin door in a panic, damaging your cabinet in the process. The cabinet whirls up a couple of octaves and laughs hysterically at you. Your game is finally over, after literally days of gameplay. You lose all progress on the game and now your cabinet is f*ed up - all because a coin slot jammed or you ran out of tokens. Life is cruel... I don't know about you all, but thinking of those kinds of scenarios will cause me to lose sleep. Besides all that, a coin door would yet again be another expense which my research suggests will most cheaply be bough second hand on eBay. Not ideal in my opinion.
The semi-circular design also prevented the 'Lost Childhood's' rotating arm from neatly fitting underneath the monitor and exterior front in the same way 1-Up's does. I overcame this in design by creating a top-mounted access panel door below the monitor support platform. This panel opens vertically to allow the next rotational arm to clear the space below the monitor and doubles as a seat for the cabinet's speakers. When the rotating control panels is seated, the top-mounted access panel returns to its original position. This position will conceal the second and third inactive control panels, close access to the interior cabinet, and most importantly - lock the control panel in place so it cannot be rotated backwards.
The rotating device itself is mounted on a piece of PVC pipe which provides the cylinder for both the rotation of the panels and a path for the electrical wiring associated with the controls to reach the keyboard encoder and the LED powersource. There are two general concerns for developing this type of mechanism: running the wires in a direction where they cannot be swept up by the arms of the rotating device, and providing a method that prevents the axis from free-rotating beyond 270 degrees at which point it would begin to twist the wiring within the pipe cylinder.
As stated earlier, a large part of the design difficulties came from the fact that the cabinet itself is cylindrical. In regard to running the wires outside the path of the rotating arms, this problem is complicated by the fact that I am limited by the means in which I can attach the front panel doors to the cabinet's exterior side walls. I needed roughly an inch or two of space between the axle mounting harness and the side walls in order to run wire down to the key board encoder and the power source. This would be impossible if the panel doors were hinged on the interior of the side walls. That would require that I reduce the depth of the panel arms to expose the PVC pipe and fit the harness inside the axle frames central support base. This would have prevented rotation and reduced the real-estate committed to stabilizing the control panels. So after another long argument with Physics again (That guy is so smug... Someday he'll lose an argument and then we'll see who's laughing), I determined that I needed to hinge the panel doors flush to the exterior side walls and create some space inside to lead the wires south from. I don't know why I hadn't thought about it before, but I eventually discovered how to make my design software create a routing shape for the harness to mount inside the side exterior walls. Since the harness was the first non-moving part the piping would come in contact with, I cut the bottom-most triangle off them and created another routing channel between them and the exterior walls for the wires. Problem solved. I'd like to mention that almost daily now, that smart ass punk 'Physics', rubs it in my face that I had such a hard time grasping what was so easy for him to understand.
Damn you Physics... Everyone hates a know-it-all...
The second challenge of preventing the rotating axle from going beyond 270 degrees is not actually drawn into the plan yet. I don't actually see this as being an issue at the moment since it will most likely be solved with something as simple as modifying the axle mounting harness to become physical obstructed at the nine o'clock position in the rotation. This will force singular rotation paths to reach each panel from any given start point and prevent free spinning of the axle. There will always be a small amount of wire twisting inside the mechanism, but electrical wires are by design made to tolerate a small degree of movement.
The semi-circular design also prevented the 'Lost Childhood's' rotating arm from neatly fitting underneath the monitor and exterior front in the same way 1-Up's does. I overcame this in design by creating a top-mounted access panel door below the monitor support platform. This panel opens vertically to allow the next rotational arm to clear the space below the monitor and doubles as a seat for the cabinet's speakers. When the rotating control panels is seated, the top-mounted access panel returns to its original position. This position will conceal the second and third inactive control panels, close access to the interior cabinet, and most importantly - lock the control panel in place so it cannot be rotated backwards. 
