Coffee Table Arcade Hides Its Controls

arcade-coffee-table-with-self-hiding-controls

[Hoogen] did a fantastic job of building arcade hardware into this Ikea coffee table. Sound familiar? We just looked at another Ikea coffee table arcade, but this one goes quite a different route. It uses a Ramvik table which has a very deep drawer in the end where the controls are located. The image to the left shows that you’re going to have a problem with the joystick when you try to close it. [Hoogen] came up with a clever mechanism to overcome this issue.

This is not an emulated system. It uses a JAMMA board called the iCade 60-in-1 to bring sixty classic arcade games to the build. To interface with this hardware [Hoogen] included a JAMMA full cabinet wiring harness. The inset image on the right is pretty small, but it shows the speaker mounted in the back of the drawer, as well as the control surface angled down. This tilting surface is what allows the controls to move out of the way when closing the drawer. This happens automatically as described by [Hoogen] in his write-up.

15 thoughts on “Coffee Table Arcade Hides Its Controls

  1. Most, if not all, XX in 1 JAMMA boards use emulation. Just because one does not install emulation software does not mean a system does not use emulation.

    Given the vast number of arcade hardware configurations out there finding 60 games that use identical hardware and wiring so that a memory switcher is all that’s needed, is so slim that I have a better chance of finding Pegasus wings, a unicorn horn, hens teeth and a hot looking Mermaid in my bed. Shame on HaD for spreading misinformation.

    1. As a MAME developer, I was planning on commenting with exactly that. Clicking on the comments and seeing that your comment was already there filled me with joy.

      The real amusing thing to me, at least – perhaps because I worked on the driver for it – is that we actually emulate one of the 39-in-1 boards. Since I’m sure there are plenty of system-on-a-chip wonks around here, for the record, it was based on an Intel PXA255 at 200MHz.

      There are other variants (4-in-1, 19-in-1, 48-in-1, and presumably what this guy used, the 60-in-1) that are dumped and recognized by the driver, but all flash ROM accesses go through an ASIC that’s different on each variant of the board, which scrambles the address and data lines for a cheap form of protection. There apparently is also a memory-mapped device that’s supposed to return key values based on a given set of writes to the device.

      So far only the 39-in-1 works in MAME, primarily because working around the protection on 39-in-1 was so hellish that I’m not enthusiastic about doing it for another 4 variants of the board, and I’m also quite crap at figuring out address/data bitswapping.

      What all of the arcade boards amount to is an ARM-based system-on-a-chip – typically the Intel PXA255 as mentioned above – with an ASIC for copy protection (lol) and a flash ROM chip to hold the game ROMs. How does it run the games? MAME, of course – typically a relatively paleolithic build of it (around 0.36 or earlier) – with the proverbial VINs filed off, though obviously not particularly well, as you can actually do a string dump on the decrypted ROM and find various MAME-specific strings.

      So, sorry to say, but [Hoogen] is most assuredly emulating all of the 60 games on his 60-in-1 board, and using a terribly old and inaccurate version of MAME, so he’s not even getting as arcade-authentic an experience as you can get in modern MAME (case in point: Donkey Kong and its discrete audio components). Live and learn, I guess!

      1. Thank you for the information, I learned a lot! But just to be clear I did not state that this wasn’t an emulated system, I knew it was. I used JAMMA Board because of the price and ease of use, also for size restrictions.

        1. I would also like to point out that these 60-in-1 boards, in addition to doing a really poor job of emulating the games, are a violation of MAME’s liscense agreement and the games in question are not liscensed to the board manufacturers by their individual owners. So, it’s a bootleg and it could get the mame team in trouble (even though they have nothing to do with it).

          That’s doubly illegal and really really bad imho.

        1. Pac-Man, most likely, or whatever hardware Scramble ran on. The number of bootlegs that ran on Pac-Man and Scramble hardware just by swapping out ROMs, or sometimes also inserting a small daughterboard between the CPU and the CPU socket, is astronomical.

  2. LACK is great to embed screens and controllers (I wouldn’t hide a full computer in there, though, as it is, after all, mostly paper.

    I did a similar project with a touchscreen and a LACK table, but my better half wanted to have a space to put down her coffee cup, so I donated it to the local hackerspace…

  3. “This is not an emulated system. It uses a JAMMA board called the iCade 60-in-1”
    So it IS an emulated system, as the multicade boards are emulator boards doing versions of MAME with a serten ROM-set.
    Other then that, this still is a neat build fellow arcader!

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