[hhtat] wanted to build an arcade cabinet since his days in high-school. Only recently have the tech planets aligned. Looking into the night sky he saw a laser cutter, the Raspberry Pi, and lowering prices on key components and thought, “this is the year.”
Much like an arcade cabinet we posted earlier, this one sits on a counter top. With full controls and a nice screen, it provides a lot of the experience without the additional explaining to the SO why the living space should house a giant decaled MDF box.
The frame was designed in SketchUp and vectors were made in Inkscape. The frame was lasercut out of MDF and Acrylic. Decals were printed and applied. The resulting case, build from tab and slot construction, is attractive.
The internals are simple. A Raspberry Pi with a fast SD card acts as the brain. Rather than make it difficult on himself, [hhat] bought a pre-made controls kit from eBay. Apparently there is a small market for this stuff. He also purchased an IPS screen with built in controller. The IPS panel gives the arcade cabinet a desireable wide viewing angle.
The final product looks like a lot of fun and we can see it turning at least one person into an unintentional loner at any house party.
I dont understand why people continue to use under-powered hardware as the basis for emulation/MAME/MESS etc?
mostly because not everyone wants to play all the latest games. a lot of us want specific cabinets and setups for older stuff. I am in the process of making a single game moon patrol cab, so please explain to me why I need an I7 with 32GB of ram a 1TB SSD drive and a 4gb latest GPU video card when the PI is more than powerful enough?
Well, no one said anything about high-end gaming specs. Also, you forgot to include a DDR4 SDRAM, a fiber optic NIC, a waterblock, and a PSU capable of producing 4K of watts for this imaginary workstation yours, running on Windows 10.
I like golden age games like pacman and Galaga. Raspi is unbeatable here.
Tell us about your system and what games you like to run.
The current Pi3 has more computing and video power than my first MAME cabinet build.
Because the 1980s to early 90s is what most people consider the heyday of arcade games, and a Pi meets those design goals handily. Also it’s cheap and easy.
Have fun resting your hands on the screws.
uhm, good point.
I use lots of acorn nuts in my projects, where I might need to remove a face or skin to do upgrades or service, but not where the user is going to be USING it!