Barcaderator Is Coin-Op Arcade Up Top And Kegerator Down Below

November 25, 2019 by Jenny List 11 Comments

It’s a common sight in our community for a life-expired arcade cabinet to be repurposed as a MAME cabinet with an up-to-date screen and other internals. Many of us have had some fun pursuing high scores in a hackerspace somewhere, and even if they don’t have the screen burn and annoying need for cash of the originals they still deliver plenty of fun.

But if there’s one pleasure an adult can pursue that a kid in a 1980s arcade couldn’t, it’s a cool glass of beer. [Marcus Young] has brought together the two with his Barcaderator, a custom MAME cabinet with a beer tap on the side and a fridge for a keg in its base.

Beer tap built in!

Split cabinet detail

The MAME internals include a Lattepanda Alpha and an LED controller for those illuminated buttons. Where this build shines is in its custom cabinet, which instead of being an all-in-one unit takes the form of a base and top half that are detatchable. It appears to take its inspiration and build techniques from the world of flight cases. You can see the detail where the two halves come together in this image. The result should be of great interest to anyone who has struggled with moving an unwieldy traditional arcade cabinet.

This is we think the first beer/arcade combo to grace these pages. But we’ve had more than one arcade cabinet, and definitely quite a few kegs along the way.

TI-99/4A KSP Controller Has A Handle On Vintage NASA Styling

October 25, 2019 by Kristina Panos 22 Comments

[MelkorsGreatestHits] had an extra USB MAME board burning a hole in his parts bin, so he turned it into fuel for this far-out Kerbal Space Program controller. Cool your jets — no fully-functioning TI-99/4As were harmed in the making of this baby. Besides, this is a KAL 9000 from Kexas Instruments. See the badges?

After donating the usable parts deemed unnecessary for space exploration, [MelkorsGreatestHits] had even more room inside the case for the throng of toggles that make this controller so touchable. We love the two tiers of toggles here — the important ones are separated with 3D-printed Space Shuttle-style switch guards, and the super-important toggles have flip-up covers to protect them from errant flicks of the hand. The vintage embosser labels are an impressive touch, and make us wish we had one that stamps vertically.

[MelkorsGreatestHits] modeled the combo throttle/roll handle and the joystick after the Apollo 11 command module controls. Unfortunately, the MAME board didn’t like his 3-axis analog joystick, so both are 2-axis and give WASD control. Good enough to get to the Mün!

We’ve seen more than a few KSP controllers around here, but none so overdone as this wonderful stand-up command station.

Via r/DIY

LEDSpicer Is An Open Source Light Controller For Your Arcade Machine

June 13, 2019 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

In this day and age of cheap and easy emulation, it’s more tempting than ever to undertake a home arcade cabinet build. If you want to show off, it’s got to have a light show to really pull the crowds in. To make that easier, [Patricio] put together a software package by the name of LEDSpicer.

The project came about when [Patricio] was working on his Linux-based MAME cabinet, and realised there were limited software options to control his Ultimarc LED board. As the existing solutions lacked features, it was time to get coding.

LEDSpicer runs on Linux only, and requires compilation, but that’s not a huge hurdle for the average MAME fanatic. It comes with a wide variety of animations, as well as tools for creating attract modes and managing LEDs during gameplay. There are even audio-reactive modes available for your gaming pleasure. It’s open source too, so it’s easy to tinker with if there’s something you’d like to add yourself.

It’s a great package that should help many arcade builders out there. LEDs can be used to great effect on a cabinet build; this marquee is a particularly good example. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Guillermo for the tip!]

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Emulating Handheld History

March 19, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

There’s a certain class of hardware only millennials will cherish. Those cheap ‘LCD Video Games’ from Tiger Electronics were sold in the toy aisle of your old department store. There was an MC Hammer video game. There was a Stargate video game. There was a Back To The Future video game. All of these used the same plastic enclosure, all of them had Up, Down, Left, Right, and two extra buttons, and all of them used a custom liquid crystal display. All of them were just slightly disappointing.

Now, there’s an effort to digitize and preserve these video games on archive.org, along with every other variety of ancient handheld and battery powered video game from ages past.

Double Dragon. You remember this, don’t you?

This is an effort from volunteers of the MAME team, who are now in the process of bringing these ‘LCD Video Games’ to the Internet Archive. Unlike other games which are just bits and bytes along with a few other relatively easily-digitized manuals and Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, preserving these games requires a complete teardown of the device. These are custom LCDs, after all. [Sean Riddle] and [hap] have been busy tearing apart these LCDs, vectorizing the segments (the game The Shadow is seen above), and preserving the art behind the LCD. It’s an immense amount of work, but the process has been refined somewhat over the years.

Some of these games, and some other earlier games featuring VFD and LED displays, are now hosted on the Internet Archive for anyone to play in a browser. The Handheld History collection joins the rest of the emulated games on the archive, with the hope they’ll be preserved for years to come.

DIY Diner Booth With Cocktail Table Arcade

September 16, 2017 by Adam Fabio 3 Comments

[Glennzo] has a house with some odd interior design choices. The most glaring one is a living room/den complete with a green Jacuzzi hot tub straight out of the 1980s. The tub really didn’t fit with [Glennzo’s] plan to use the space as a bar and game room, so out came the Sawzall and demo hammer. The tub was in its own little alcove, possibly a converted closet. [Glennzo’s] turned the space into a restaurant style booth complete with a cocktail arcade table.

The fiberglass tub was relatively easy to cut up and remove. This left the wood framed tile tub surround. The surround was extended to become a booth seat. A bit of creative woodworking, some vinyl cushions, and the booth itself was ready. But what good is a booth without a table?

The cocktail table arcade machine is powered by a mini-tower running MAME. The monitor is an old 21″ LCD. The frame of the table is plywood and pine lumber, finished with stain and polyurethane. The illuminated buttons and interface came from an arcade control kit, which made wiring a snap. The table is topped off with a custom 3/8″ thick piece of glass.

The final product looks great and fits the room perfectly. Now [Glennzo] just needs a BarBot to finish off the perfect hacker and gamer paradise!

Toy Dash Turned Gaming Interface

August 30, 2017 by John Baichtal 15 Comments

We see a lot of MAME cabinets and other gaming emulator projects here on Hackaday, but it’s not often that we see one the form factor of which so elegantly matches the ROM. [circuitbeard] converted a Tomy Turnin Turbo toy dashboard into a mini arcade machine playing Outrun.

There are many fascinating details in [circuitbeard]’s writeup. His philsophy is to “keep it looking stock” so he went to great lengths to add functionality to various elements of the toy without changing its appearance. The gear shifter was turned into a 3-way momentary switch with high and low speeds at top and bottom, with rubber bands pulling the switch back the center (neutral) when he lets go of it. The original toy’s steering wheel mounts to a slide potentiometer. The dash has a working ignition switch that uses a PowerBlock to manage the safe startup and shutdown of the Pi. The dash also lights up the way you’d expect, and even displays accurate MPG and rev info.

For more MAME goodness here on Hackaday, see this broken tablet turned into a mini MAME cabinet or the portable MAME system of the future

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Completely Owning The Dreamcast Add-on You Never Had

July 17, 2017 by Elliot Williams 30 Comments

If you’ve got a SEGA Dreamcast kicking around in a closet somewhere, and you still have the underutilized add-on Visual Memory Unit (VMU), you’re in for a treat today. If not, but you enjoy incredibly detailed hacks into the depths of slightly aged silicon, you’ll be even more excited. Because [Dmitry Grinberg] has a VMU hack that will awe you with its completeness. With all the bits in place, the hacking tally is a new MAME emulator, an IDA plugin, a never-before ROM dump, and an emulator for an ARM chip that doesn’t exist, running Flappy Bird. All in a month’s work!

The VMU was a Dreamcast add-on that primarily stored game data in its flash memory, but it also had a small LCD display, a D-pad, and inter-VMU communications functions. It also had room for a standalone game which could interact with the main Dreamcast games in limited ways. [Dmitry] wanted to see what else he could do with it. Basically everything.

We can’t do this hack justice in a short write-up, but the outline is that he starts out with the datasheet for the VMU’s CPU, and goes looking for interesting instructions. Then he started reverse engineering the ROM that comes with the SDK, which was only trivially obfuscated. Along the way, he wrote his own IDA plugin for the chip. Discovery of two ROP gadgets allowed him to dump the ROM to flash, where it could be easily read out. Those of you in the VMU community will appreciate the first-ever ROM dump.

On to doing something useful with the device! [Dmitry]’s definition of useful is to have it emulate a modern CPU so that it’s a lot easier to program for. Of course, nobody writes an emulator for modern hardware directly on obsolete hardware — you emulate the obsolete hardware on your laptop to get a debug environment first. So [Dmitry] ported the emulator for the VMU’s CPU that he found in MAME from C++ to C (for reasons that we understand) and customized it for the VMU’s hardware.

Within the emulated VMU, [Dmitry] then wrote the ARM Cortex emulator that it would soon run. But what ARM Cortex to emulate? The Cortex-M0 would have been good enough, but it lacked some instructions that [Dmitry] liked, so he ended up writing an emulator of the not-available-in-silicon Cortex-M23, which had the features he wanted. Load up the Cortex emulator in the VMU, and you can write games for it in C. [Dmitry] provides two demos, naturally: a Mandlebrot set grapher, and Flappy Bird.

Amazed? Yeah, we were as well. But then this is the same guy emulated an ARM chip on the AVR architecture, just to run Linux on an ATMega1284p.