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Arcade Cabinet

Arcade cabinet build around a Raspberry Pi 2 B running Porta Pi (Retropie + Emulationstation) with detachable control panel.

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Arcade cabinet with Raspberry pi 2 B + Porta PI (RetroPie + Emulationstation).
The control panel is detachable and can be hooked up to any HDMI tv.
I designed the whole thing in Google SketchUp and made it out of 12mm MDF.
Inside the control panel is a Raspberry Pi B, an amplifier and a power cord which is connected to a switch on the outside. The pi, amplifier and screen are powered from that power cord.

The software will always be a work in progress, right now i have the following emulators running perfectly : SNES, NES, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy (Color) and Atari2600, other emulators work aswell but i don't want all of them.

I kept track of the costs and there's about 350 euro of materials in there, i spared no expense but tried to keep it as cheap as possible. Ultimatly it costs me a bit more since i made a few mistakes along the way.
  • 1 × Raspberry Pi 2 B Computer
  • 1 × Universal 22watt RMS mosfet amplifier Amplifier
  • 1 × HP Compaq LA1951G Screen
  • 1 × Sanwa JLF-TP-8YT Joystick
  • 1 × Molex power suply 2A Power for the amplifier

  • New marquee image!

    Lumor12/10/2016 at 16:03 0 comments

    Now that i have a good color printer, i finally decided to make a fancy new marquee image. I made the image in GIMP a while back, i tried to match the yellow of the arcade cabinet and it came out very nice.

    I would like to light up the marquee, but it doesn't look good with printed photo-paper. For it to light up nicely i really need a high quality image on some kind of plastic i think, i'm not sure and i'm probably not gonna try.

    I want some decals on the sides too, but i need to buy some good sticker paper for that. Will happen soon!

  • Things to do

    Lumor02/02/2015 at 23:29 0 comments

    1. Get a splash screen working for the entire startup procedure.

    2. Make my own theme or download one that looks good with the cabinet.

    3. Buy decals and stick em on the cabinet, it looks a bit dull right now.

    4. ...

View all 2 project logs

  • 1
    Step 1

    Here is a rough overview of what i did to get it al working, some steps are more detailed than others, i will try to share as much as i can.

    1. Download the porta pi image (google it), this is a pre-configured pack of retropie and emulationstation and has a bunch of emulators installed.

    2. Mount it on a SD card using Win32 Disk Imager.

    3. Edit the GPIO mapping (See step 2).

    4. Place your roms on a USB stick and transfer them to your Raspberry Pi and place them in the correct folders inside /home/pi/RetroPie/roms (for examle, place your GBA games inside /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/GBA).

    5. For the GBA emulator to work you need to download a BIOS and place it on your pi, see step 3 for detailed instructions.

    6. Getting the startup splash screen to work (see step 4).

  • 2
    Step 2

    Edit GPIO mapping :

    1. Open retrogame config file :

    CD /home/pi/Retrogame
    
    sudo nano retrogame.c


    2. Scroll down until you see the input array.

    3. For a 1-player arcade machine you need to remove the player 2 inputs for it to work.

    4. Edit the GPIO pin numbers for player 1 arcording to your wiring.

    5. Press CTRL + O to save your changes

    6. Press CTRL + X to exit the editor


    7. Make the file and reboot :

    make
    
    sudo reboot



  • 3
    Step 3

    Getting the GBA emulator to work :

    1. Download gba_bios.bin.

    2. Transfer gba_bios.bin to /home/pi/retropie/BIOS from a USB stick.

    3. Reboot your pi :

    sudo reboot


    4. Move the file to it's destination folder :

    cd /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS
    
    sudo cp gba_bios.bin /opt/retropie/emulators/gpsp/raspberrypi


    5. Start emulationstation :

    emulationstation


    6. Configuring input controls for the GBA emulator :

    Open any game.

    Press F10 while in the game.

    Choose the 'input keyboard' option.

    Here you can change your keyboard inputs.

View all 4 instructions

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Discussions

fenwick wrote 02/04/2015 at 01:53 point

What did you do for the edges of the MDF? I built one about 4 years ago but I didn't do anything for the edges and it looked awful.

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Lumor wrote 02/04/2015 at 02:12 point

It's called T-molding.

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Hacker404 wrote 08/02/2015 at 02:32 point

I am guessing that you had to cut some of the inner part of the 'T' mould to get it around those tight radius’s? or did flex enough? I was going to use 'T' mould at one stage but I didn't want to make the larger radius's that I expected it would need. 

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Lumor wrote 08/02/2015 at 11:56 point

Exactly, i used a pair of nippers to cut out a V at the point where it bends. Be carefull when using an exacto knife instead of nippers, it"s quite easy to accedentally cut the whole thing in half. For large radius i would cut out multiple V's in a row.

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tballantine178 wrote 12/12/2014 at 13:32 point
what about step by step build instructions

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Lumor wrote 12/12/2014 at 13:45 point
A step by step instruction of the whole thing would be allot of work, but i'm happy to help if you are stuck with something, just let me know ;).

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