After perusing Amazon one day, [Dave] found a very interesting piece of kit: a small, 1.5″ digital picture frame. They’re not very complex, just an LCD, a few buttons to cycle the picture, and a battery to keep everything portable. He decided the best use of this tech would be a tiny arcade cabinet, featuring screen shots of the best games a darkly neon lit arcade of the late 80s had to offer.
After sourcing a few of these digital picture frames on eBay, [Dave] set to work disassembling the frames and designing a custom enclosure. He wanted a few specific features: controls in the right place, replaceable sides, and the glowing red eyes of a coin acceptor slot. [Dave] whipped a model up in OpenSCAD and sent the parts over to his printer.
The controls for the digital picture frame were connected to a quartet of tact switches on the control panel, and a red LED provides the glow from the coin acceptor. With a USB plug and the frame’s memory loaded up with screen shots, [Dave] has a fabulous desk toy.
All the relevant files are up on Thingiverse if you’d like to build your own.
How fun! The coin slots are a brilliant touch and really make it.
Now not to self-promote, but on the other end of the geek mod spectrum I have a steampunk thingamajig made from a similar frame here: http://jakehildebrandt.com/2013/05/21/image-viewer/
That is pretty nice looking, should have sent it in to the tip line.
The display looks remarkably similar to the one used here..
http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/reverse-engineering-a-1-5-inch-photoframe/
..So in theory you could make a fully functional Pacman cabinet in that form factor.
Can you actually play these?
Seeing as it explicitly mentions screenshots, I’m guessing “no.”
These are just case mods. Making playable mini-arcades like this would be epic though.
And not actually impossible either… Take a Carambola or an embedded arm, code up a Pacman-workalike and connect it all to an 128×128 LCD, and you should be good.
Could something similar be done by using a raspberry pi running an emulator and maybe a bluetooth controller?
Well, you would know. I was actually kinda disappointed that none of these machines built on your existing picframe work.
Agreed!!! Talk about cramming! RPI for backend?
There are a number of excellent, functional mini arcade hacks that have been previousely featured here. My favorite is this one http://hackaday.com/2012/12/11/building-a-tiny-arcade-cabinet-from-a-game-boy-advance/
http://imgur.com/gallery/yGDTKoQ
Sure – they might not have the same exact level of excitement as the full size versions – but pop your miniature quarter in there and see what happens.
Craft-a-day
Zoolnader/”Is this an arcade for ANTS?!” jokes to begin in 3, 2, 1…
“It needs to be… At least three times bigger than this!”
:p
Pretty cool. He should make them playable.
http://spritesmods.com/?art=picframe
It will definitely generate some interest in people, but interest dies quite quickly. It is important to have more features than just “tiny arcade cabinet.”
i saw this one while searching for mame stuff the other day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P7cwjOnr40
he just ports mame on the GP2X wiz and re-houses it in the tiny cabnet
Or like this:
[img]http://meuk.spritesserver.nl/foto/foto/misc15/tmb-IMG_0909_mod.JPG[/img]
From Sprites mods
I have a few photo keychains laying around, but the software is too old. MacDPFMate is pre-loaded on a mounted partition, but it is for PowerPC architecture. Any ideas on how to get new photos on it? I was going to make something similar but with an Adventure Time BMO screen slideshow.
forgotten the name off the top of my head, sorry. But there is a PowerPC mac emulator somewhere.
I stumbled across some similar mini cabs the other day. The Discs Of Tron cabinet is very cool.
http://retro-heart.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.electronixandmore.com/projects/tinytetris/index.html
Camcorder viewfinders !!
Super cool, makes me wish I had a 3D printer.