The Mini-Markade

We love arcade games. Who doesn’t? We feel that the “arcade” feeling just can’t be replicated in any other form factor than an arcade cabinet. [Moslevin] must feel the same way too. He has built, what could possibly be the worlds smallest arcade cabinet. Aside from a coin mechanism, it is fully functional. It is an ATMega328p running his own custom software. The games he has available are Tetris, Invader, and Breakout, all coded by himself as well. We’ve seen small arcade cabinets before, but none this small.

28 thoughts on “The Mini-Markade

  1. I take back what I said, I saw your using OLED display (by 4D Systems). I believe they sell OLED displays with the graphics driver onboard

    somthing like the “”µOLED-96-G1(GFX)”” @ 50$ us
    (which is pretty pricey for this type of project).

    Would I be able to render the graphics using cheaper method (as opposed to OLED Display Module by 4dsystem )?

  2. All of the graphics are stored on the AVR, and all of the animation/rendering is controlled entirely by the AVR.

    The graphics hardware itself is a 4D Systems OLED module, which talks to the AVR over a serial command interface and handles the “pixel-level” interface.

    Everything is abstracted through the RTOS device driver interface though, so there’s nothing in the code that relies on any specific feature of that module, and no difference between the graphics output on a 4D systems display, a parallel graphics LCD, or a PC Framebuffer.

  3. You can get the OLED display from farnell (1583044) and interface it directly to the AVR. The interface is straight forward and well described in the datasheet (regular SPI bus). But you need to supply +12V to the display.

    4D System basically charges you for the breakout board (which generates +12V) and the fool proof interface.

  4. I want to laser-cut my own arcade cabinet .. anyone know of any designs online that are worth checking out before I go ahead and just wing one together myself? Ideally I’d like it to be about 50cm tall .. but I’m open to any options, if there are already designs for the cabinet out there ..

  5. @Lupin – Thanks for the info on the OLED! I plan on doing a limited production run at some point, and being able to drive the display directly would greatly reduce the overall cost (even if it meant moving to a larger AVR part), and if it’s SPI then it should be very easy to implement a FunkOS display driver to drive it.

    @JasonX – I’ll probably release the source in some form in the future, it probably needs a bit of documentation and review before it’s ready for prime time.

  6. Yes – everything does fit in the cabinet (although there isn’t a lot of extra space, that’s for sure). I have a back panel for it, but I’m waiting to install the power switch in it before I assemble it into the cabinet.

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