I built an cocktail table arcade machine in 2004-ish and a standup arcade from the now defunct SlikStik in 2005-ish. That kinda scratched my itch on classic arcade emulation for a good while.
Good news is, there’s a LOT more options today, they’re cheaper and way more awesome!
For example, I just ordered this bartop 19" screen vertical JAMMA machine – I am pretty stoked it has both trackball and joystick which is rare in these kind of mass-produced models. Also a coin slot, which I didn’t need, but … OK.
And because I suddenly felt like a lame-o slacker not a Maker, man, I ordered a Picade kit from the UK, along with an upgrade 12" screen from eBay, to build it myself:
I was thinking, why is this so much more interesting than the last time I did this, a decade ago?
The ascendance of Raspberry Pi, specifically, makes it super easy… it’s on version 3, which adds critical WiFi and Bluetooth, and is even fast enough to emulate N64 and PSX reasonably, for a whole $35. Just download the RetroPie bootable OS on a $6 16GB SD card, slot it into your Pi, and… basically you’re done. Add ROMs and images to taste. (It comes with some free games on it.)
They have these Chinese ripoff JAMMA cards (Pandora’s Box is one “brand”) which are an entire arcade on a board, with ARM CPU and built-in ROMs and everything, for like $90. I’m sure completely illegal and unlicensed, of course. You could buy some old broken down husk of an arcade game, anything, and as long as it’s a JAMMA compatible arcade game (standard introduced in 1985) with working monitor and controls, plug this in and bam: a whole arcade in a box.
Cheap, quality IPS type LCDs with good viewing angles. CRTs were a giant pain in the butt to deal with, for size, power, etc reasons. And viewing angle is kinda critical for arcade machines.
Add all that up – not like the price of MDF or arcade buttons and joysticks has changed much – and it’s damn near a golden age for classic arcade emulation! For basically $300 (or maybe $800 if you want to get extra fancy and do a 19" bartop, either vertical or horizontal) you can have a pretty great classic arcade and classic console emulation experience. That’s way better than I was doing in 2004, even adjusting for inflation…
I found a horizontal bartop I like. The cool thing is you can fit pretty large IPS monitors in these horizontal bartop designs. This one handled up to 21" wide so I found a narrow bezel 23" diagonal IPS 1080p monitor that just squeaks in there.
I can’t get over how good that damn hires sidebar art is for vertical games. Normally you would want a real vertical monitor orientation for these games, of course, but this 1080p art sure livens up those inevitable “dead areas” on the left and right when playing a vertical game on a large horizontal monitor.
I built a massive home arcade emulator a few years back, built out of like 19 tons of MDF and housing an authentic circa 1993 CRT arcade monitor. I built the control panel to be able to play Gauntlet and pretty much any other game I could think of:
Anyway, to power the thing I used a bunch of ancient PC parts that are effectively just screwed into the cabinet in the back, and it howls like a banshee with the PC fan, the power supply fan and the graphics fan all echoing out of the cabinet.
I figure my next home project (after I am done with my irrigation system) is replacing the guts of the thing with a Raspberry Pi that I picked up expressly for that purpose. My only real worry is the CRT display – it’s “native” resolution is 480 x 260 or thereabouts, and I don’t know that RetroPi will handle that or not.
And for others considering the (very rewarding) DIY approach, do NOT use my design – the riser is too close to the trackball, which means if you’re playing Golden Tee or something that requires “macro” movements of the ball, you’ll whack your hand pretty good.
I found this bartop design on eBay, bought it, and I really like the design: two pieces attached with magnets, uses a plain vanilla 23" LCD that fits perfectly in the top half edge-to-edge, actual dimensions are 21" internal.
You can detach the control bits and use it as a regular USB arcade controller.
Nice bonus I didn’t understand until I got it: he used real wood so it’s amazingly light for its size. I guess you get used to the crazy density / weight of MDF in the arcade space…
I am in contact with the seller, he plans to build 10 more on eBay. Design is basically the same, but the control panel will dock a tad deeper. I told him he should also (minor tweaks, really):
build in a dedicated location for the Pi, where the USB ports can be accessed maybe without removing the whole case back
add a female USB port in the front to make it easier to dock/undock the controller. I already jerry rigged one into mine
The seller is a super nice guy – his eBay post was documented to the hilt, in a manner that I found so exhaustive that it was something I’d have been proud to have under my name. I don’t say that often!
Have you tried using a wireless xbox 360 controller with any of your raspberry pi emulators? Reading online it sounds like it should be really easy, however when I plug my receiver in it won’t light up so I can’t connect a controller to it. Searching online I can’t find anyone else who is having this same issue which seems weird. The receiver works fine on my PC though.
Edit: Well, it seems as though my wireless receiver is no longer working in my PC either. It was working fine until I unplugged it and then hooked it up to my Pi.
Weird, it’s very rare to break a USB thingy just by removing it. :( Bad luck, sorry to hear that.
Just in case you get another one and something comes up, the wireless receiver draws quite a bit of power. I had an issue a couple motherboards back where they only way I could get it to work was to connect it to a powered USB hub and then to my machine. But once I did that everything was swell. In under-powered mode it would come on but could never connect to a controller.
Hmm related to what @arrendek is saying, a quality power supply for modern Pi, especially 3, is quite important.
A lot of weirdness that happens with the Pi 3 can be traced back to power supplies that weren’t designed to feed 5v to a tiny computer, but recharge some small lithium batteries. It happened to me, too!
(Long story, but I used the Pi 3 that I received in the cabinet I bought from eBay as-is. I saw this rainbow block at the upper right when transferring roms from the RetroPie dashboard. I thought “oh that must be the transferring roms indicator” well, no, turns out that’s the “you are under voltage” indicator. And just from plugging in a USB stick, no actual games were being played! I replaced the power supply with another one I bought from a reputable eBay vendor, and that problem went away.)
Moral of the story is, don’t just slap any old recycled mini-usb phone charger power adapter on the Pi 3. Get something designed for a high draw device like a recent iPad, at minimum.
The powersupply I’m using came in a kit with the Pi so it should be decent.
I saw that info on fixing the fuse, however I haven’t used a soldering iron in a long long time, and bypassing a fuse seems like a bad idea to me. Seems like they put fuses there for a reason.
I’m going to end up ordering a decently rated knockoff brand off amazon to replace it.
Other than the 360 controller issue, things have went smoothly though and I now have my Pi setup with retropie, emulators are working, and I’ve also installed Kodi to use as a media center. Finally I want to get Moonlight installed so I can stream my steam games to my Pi. It looks like that might be a little trickier to do.
I just got an arcade cabinet and I’m going to throw in a 32" TV and my X-Arcade Tankstick.
Plan is to use my son’s old desktop PC to power it.
Any tips on front-ends, etc for easy of use? Got an Advanced Power Strip to make everything turn off automatically when the PC shuts down or goes to sleep to simplify the on/off aspect.
