Building an arcade cabinet seems to be a rite of passage for many hackers and woodworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with that: as this series of posts from [Alessandro] at boxedcnc shows, there is an art to doing it well.
His final build is impressive, with quality buttons, a genuine-looking banner, and even a coin slot so he can charge people to play. His build log covers both the carpentry and electronic aspects of the build, from cutting the panels to his own code for running the coin acceptor that takes your quarter (or, as he is in Italy, Euro coins) and triggers the game to play.
To extract money from his family, he used the Sparkfun COM-1719 coin acceptor, which can be programmed to send different pulses for different coins, connected to an Arduino which is also connected to the joystick and buttons. The Arduino emulates a USB keyboard and is connected to an old PC running MAME with the Attract Mode front end. It’s a quality build, down to the Bubble Bobble banner, and the coin slot means that it might even make some money back eventually.
Nice! I would like to see how do this keyboard emulator deals with multiple simultaneous press, as far as the report buffer is limited to 6 keys. Maybe using rollover keycode and cascading reports?
It’s a simple fix in software, just freeze the game, pop up a requester saying, “Please press only one button at a time, ^^VVBA to continue.”
;-)
Gah, that was
"Please press only one button at a time, ^^VVBA to continue."Double gah, strips greater than, lesser than in the code tag???
I already told you how to do that!
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/quick-escape/default.php
< for <
> for >
You act like I was paying attention :-P
Remind me of this post when it comes up again will ya? :-D
You can increase the keysize report to include more then 6 keys at the same time. I did it for my ArduinoMega2560 based key controller:
https://github.com/NotNallath/iMvaders/blob/master/ArduinoController/ATMega8U2/Descriptors.c#L46
(Note, this USB device does confuse the BIOS of the computer, so it does not always boot correctly)
Thanks for linking to that coin operator. I was looking for an inexpensive one for my project.
I like the natural cable management, too many posed shots with studio models are setting unattainable and unhealthy beauty standards for our digital children. ;-)
I just came to say I freaking love Bubble Bobble.
This build badly needs some T-molding
I thought I was the only one that noticed. HackaDay has really low standards. They called this an impressive build. This looks like a first whack at an arcade machine.
Yep. Especially if you’re into arcade machines.
Well the writer noted that what impressed him was bright colored buttons the banner and a coin mech, so low bar there.
Worth noticing that Sparkfun has two different kinds of coin acceptors: https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=COIN+ACCEPTOR
I’ve personally integrated https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11636 into my arcade and it works great! When using Windows you don’t even need an arduino, just parse the input and trigger any key you want through software. This model also supports coins with a hole in them as we use in Norway. Others may not support this!
My build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-2C4YOy8W4