Bartop Arcade Cabinet Build Skips The Kit

January 14, 2018 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

An arcade cabinet is one of those things that every gamer wants at home, but few ever get. Getting a real arcade cabinet is usually expensive, and building one yourself is no small feat. There are kits you can get now which help the process along, generally taking the form of pre-cut cabinet parts, but with them comes the quiet shame of kit-building. What if your friends found out you used a kit instead of designing it yourself? The drama is almost too much to think about.

That’s how [Bogdan Berg] felt about it, at least. Not content with just getting a pre-cut cabinet kit from eBay, he decided to design and build his own bartop arcade machine in just one week: fast enough for him to fit the whole thing into his Christmas vacation. We don’t know what Christmas was like for his friends and family this year with him toiling away on this beautiful build the whole time, but we can confidently say his Christmas was awesome.

He designed the cabinet in Fusion 360, working around the limitation that the laser cutter he had access to had a work area of 24 inches by 18 inches. Some interesting design choices were made here, including going with a tab and slot construction method. While [Bogdan] admits that this aesthetic isn’t always popular, he liked how sturdy it makes the final product.

He was originally going to use plywood for the cabinet, but owing to the fact that he couldn’t find any pieces that weren’t warped locally, he switched over to MDF. Using MDF did mean he had to seal all the cut pieces with shellac before painting, but in the end he’s happy with the final lacquer paint job; even if it did take more work and materials than he anticipated.

The hardware is pretty much the standard for DIY arcades these days: a 17 inch LCD monitor he had laying around is used for the display, a two player joystick and button kit from Amazon provides the user interface, and emulation is provided by a Raspberry Pi 3 running RetroPie. A recessed door in the rear allows him to get into the machine will still maintaining a finished look on the backside.

While the size of them may vary wildly, DIY arcade cabinets are always a popular project. Whether shamelessly emblazoned with our logo or playing host to glorious LED lighting, it seems like the design of these cabinets provide as much entertainment as the games they play.

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A Laser Cut Arcade Cabinet For Ants

December 25, 2017 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

Most of us would probably like to have an arcade cabinet at home, but it’s hard to justify the space they take up. Sure it’s an awesome conversation starter when friends are over, and you might even play it regularly, but at some point you’ll look over at the corner and realize there’s probably something more practical you could be doing with that particular section of the room.

Perhaps the solution is to just make a smaller one. You could do one at half scale, or even desktop sized. But why stop there? Why not make one so small that you could put the thing in a drawer when you don’t need it? While it might be more of an academic experiment than a practical entertainment device, [RedPixel] has managed to create just such an easily concealable arcade cabinet out of a Pi Zero and laser cut wood. At only 83 mm high, this may well be the smallest functional arcade cabinet ever made (at least for now).

All of the cabinet parts were drawn in Inkscape and cut out of 3 mm plywood. The buttons and joystick are wired directly to the Pi Zero’s GPIO pins and configured with Adafruit-retrogame. The display is a SPI ILI9163, which [RedPixel] previously documented on his site.

The Pi is running the ever-popular RetroPie, which allows this tiny arcade cabinet to emulate 1000’s of console and arcade games, assuming you can deal with the controls anyway. While [RedPixel] has uploaded a video of his lilliputian cabinet running an emulator, there’s no video of him actually playing the thing. While we don’t doubt that it functions as advertised, gameplay on such a tiny array of inputs must be very difficult.

This may be the smallest functional arcade cabinet to date, but it isn’t without challengers. We’ve covered a number of very impressive builds that manage to invoke the look and feel of a hulking coin-up despite fitting neatly on your desk.

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Galaga Cabinet Is Out Of This World

October 6, 2016 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Like many of us, [Alex] spent a large part of his childhood feeding coin after coin into one arcade game or another. Galaga is one of his all-time favorites, and he has wanted to build a Galaga cabinet for a long time. Once his workshop was ready for the job, it was time to cross it off the list.

The cabinet is built to 4/5 scale. This is a great size because he gets the stability and feel of a full-size machine, but it’s much easier to move it around. As you might expect, there’s Pi in the cabinet. The display is an old TV that [Alex] found in a Dumpster. And although it works great, it would go into standby instead of powering off along with everything else. To get around this, [Alex] built an automatic remote control with an IR LED and an Arduino Diecimila. After a five-second wait, it sends the power-on code to the TV and switches the input. The TV is supposed to be in portrait mode for Galaga, but this proved to be a challenge. Changing the orientation at the Pi level resulted in poor performance and choppy sound, so he changed it at the game execution level.

We are continually impressed by the diversity of [Alex]’s builds and the care that goes into them. Who could forget his beautiful sidewalk graffiti machine or the time he showed us how to photograph stuff that’s not there? Make the jump to see a brief demonstration followed by a two-part build video.

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Broken Android Tablet Mini-MAME Cabinet

March 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

Everyone’s got an unused or even quasi-broken tablet lying around these days. [sairuk] has three kids, and somehow ended up with three broken tablets in short order. We’re not saying that correlation implies causality…

The digitizers were shattered, and since they were relatively cheap tablets to begin with, [sairuk] started thinking what could be done with a tablet that doesn’t have touch sensing anymore. He tried making an e-book reader for his kids, but somehow the idea of a MAME “cablet” (get it?) won out in the end. We’re not surprised: simple woodworking, gaming, and electronic hacking. What’s not to love?

This writeup goes into a lot more detail, so check that out too. He and his sons built up cardboard prototypes first (we love cardboard!) and then transferred their plans over to wood for the final “rough cut”. A PS1 controller reads out the joystick and buttons, and a PS1 -> USB adapter plus a USB-OTG cable connects that to the tablet. They also removed the batteries and built in a permanent power supply. Everything is simple and cheap, but the results are still impressive. Although they claim their build isn’t finished to the utmost, it looks pretty darn good to us.

We’re all frackers, so it’s satisfying to see a “junk” tablet put to good use. We’re wondering what [sairuk] is going to do with his other two tablets — we’ve got a suggestion for what he should do if he had twenty kids.

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Most Beautiful Mini-Galaga-Pi Ever!

January 30, 2016 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

The problem with click-bait titles, besides the fact that they make the reader feel cheated and maybe a little bit dirty for reading the article, is that they leave us with nothing to say when something is truly outstanding. But the video of [Tiburcio de la Carcova] building up a mini-Galaga cabinet (complete with actual tiny CRT screen from an old portable 5″ TV) is actually the best we’ve ever seen.

Plywood is laser-cut. Custom 3D printed parts are manufactured and assembled, including the joysticks and coin door. Aluminum panels are cut on a bandsaw and bent with a hand brake. Parts are super-glued. In short, it’s a complete, sped-up video of the cutting-edge of modern DIY fab. If that’s not enough reason to spend four minutes of your time, we don’t know what is.

[Tiburcio] has also made a mini Space Invaders, and is thinking of completing the top-20 of his youth. Pacman, Asteroids, and Missile Command are next. We can’t wait.

There are (ahem) a couple of Raspberry-Pi-powered video game emulators on Hackaday, so it’s a little awkward to pick one or two to link in. We’ll leave you with this build that also uses a small CRT monitor to good effect albeit in less-fancy clothing.

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Scratch-Built Bar Top MAME Cabinet

April 7, 2015 by Rich Bremer 6 Comments

Video game enthusiast [Mike] is all about the journey and not necessarily the destination. That is why he likes working on projects and documenting their progress with great detail. His bar top MAME machine is certainly no exception.

One of [Mike’s] goals was to see if he could keep the look and feel of a large arcade cabinet but scale it down so that it was portable. He started with drawing up a model in Sketchup. Once satisfied with the layout and making sure everything would fit, the side panels were cut out of pine boards and will only be clear-coated. The remaining panels are cut from MDF as they will be covered in a matching decorative vinyl wrap.

The control panel may look simple but a lot of thought went into it. Of course, there is a joystick but [Mike] chose to only use 4 game-play buttons. He did this to save space and estimates he’ll still be able to play 90% of the available MAME games. Those 4 buttons are illuminated and the MAME front end, Mala, was configured to light up only the functional buttons for the particular game being played. Front and center on the control board is a rotary encoder for playing games like Arkanoid or games requiring a steering wheel.

In the end this build came out pretty nice looking. His build log is a great reference to hit before starting your next arcade cabinet project.

Although [Mike] calls his MAME cabinet ‘mini’, it’s not the most mini we’ve seen here on Hackaday.

Push-Button Degaussing For An Arcade CRT

September 23, 2014 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

[Ed] was tasked with adding push-button degaussing to an arcade cabinet’s CRT console. The display can be rotated to portrait mode for games that require it, but each time this is done, the magnetic fields get out of whack.

Fortunately, the schematics arrived with the display. [Ed] found that the degauss coil is connected in series with a PTC fuse in an odd arrangement that he didn’t agree with. He decided to use an SSR to switch the coil, and after making lots of transistor-based designs on paper, grabbed a nearby Arduino.

[Ed] took off the PTC and soldered in two wires to its pads for the SSR. He added a wire to the power supply decoupling cap to power the new deguassing circuit and connected the SSR to the Arduino as an open collector input. There was just enough space available to mount the relay to the frame’s base and the Arduino on the side. [Ed] wrote a short method to trigger the SSR and reconnected the PTC fuse. Now it degausses at power up as well as on demand.