Budget Home Arcade Machine | Hacker News Reader

Budget Home Arcade Machine

jsante.net

104 pointseightfold32 comments

I've built pretty much the same thing using a RPi3, a USB adapter with two SNES controllers, and a wooden cabinet with two arcade sticks + lots of buttons + another USB interface, with the RetroPie (https://retropie.org.uk/) OS distribution.

It won't play any games newer than say, PS1 (due to CPU limitations and the storage I have available) - but I've got every NES / SNES / Atari2600/5200/7200 / Intellivision / Gameboy / GBA game/ROM ever released, and an older MAME ROM set, all on a 16G SD card with about 9G free.

It will also do some DOSBox stuff and lots of other 8bit platforms that I don't have any ROMs installed for.

RPi: $35ish

SNES controllers: $15 off ebay

SNES USB adapter: $12 off amazon

2-player MAME joysticks/buttons parts kit w/XinMo USB encoder: $55ish off eBay

The most expensive part of the whole thing was the 2-player MAME wooden cabinet (predrilled holes, etc), which was about $75 from an eBay seller.

Display is whatever HDMI-input device I have lying around. Using a 24" monitor at work right now (building one of these for the office lounge).

My grand total: around $200.

Woah, can you please provide a little more info on the software and OS you're using on the Pi? I've got a good Windows-based setup using MaLa as a frontend, but I'd love to do this on the Pi.

https://retropie.org.uk/

Holy crap, nice work on the cabinet cost, that's a steal!

The cabinet was the only cost I just couldn't get down. I found broken down arcades on craigslist for less than $200 but I'd need to get them home and retrofit. Guess I should've kept an eye on ebay for longer.

Could you show us some pics of the cabinet, would love to see how it turned out

For cabinets, if you don't mind a weekend project, I've found the Vigolix to be a fantastic DIY cabinet you can build from a single sheet of plywood:

http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Super-Easy-Arcade-Machine-...

I also went with the Tankstick, and am now entering my 6th month of heavily abusing it (my 4-year-old beats the heck out of it) and it still works great. I was able to just cut a hole in the Vigolix and drop the Tankstick right in. The latest one with the trackball is really fun for games like Centipede and Tempest:

http://shop.xgaming.com/products/x-arcade-tankstick-trackbal...

I first ran it on a brand new LCD screen, but so many of the games look terrible on it. I eventually bought a 24-inch CRT from a used electronics store for $100, and it made a huge difference. I would love to get a larger CRT, but they seem to get exponentially more expensive the larger they go.

For MAME ROMs, I went with an 8-year-old torrent of 6,000 ROMS, which had screenshots and config files all ready to go. There was some iffy software in the MAME files that Windows flagged as spyware, so I took the ROMS and screenshots and dropped them into a fresh MAME download (I had to grab an older version of MAME because the config files weren't compatible with newer versions). The MALA front end is fantastic, and I easily configured it with a Star Trek LCARS theme. I've been exploring this collection for months now and keep finding favorite classics I had completely forgotten about.

My only complaint is that no matter what version of MAME I run, I seem to only get about a 50/50 chance of any ROM I download running. I know I'm not the only one who has this problem. Otherwise, this is very fun hobby preserving these old titles that would otherwise be forgotten.

I went through the process of attempting to build my own arcade cabinet in the mid-2000s and failing spectacularly. [1] I think I'm too much of a perfectionist to accept my own woodworking as "good enough" (even though in retrospect the results were not terrible and could likely have been finished by someone skilled).

Lately I've been researching pre-built kits to save some time and sanity. From what I can tell, the folks at Northcoast have decent pre-built cabinets [2]. Has anyone tried those out?

[1] https://www.google.ca/search?q=site:grack.com+cabinet

[2] https://www.mameroom.com/webstore.asp?productid=UAIIKIT&cate...

There's also Polycade: http://www.polycade.com/

I have a friend who was considering a cabinet of this style. While I really like the tiny footprint, there's something about playing classic arcade games on a big boxy cabinet that evokes a real nostalgia dopamine response in me. That's a great option, though - thanks for pointing it out.

I made an arcade machine for my dad (though far from budget) for Christmas in 2013 and chronicled the build here: http://mattparkes.net/project/arcade-machine/

I'm about halfway through building one for myself (following the same build with a few refinements).

These MAME cabinets are neat, but there's also something magical about restoring and owning the original single-game cabinets.

My favorite video channel on the subject: https://m.youtube.com/user/blkdog7/channels?

Although I went the MAME route, I have immense respect for people who restore the old cabinets. There really is nothing like stepping up to the original Star Wars, Space Harrier, or Tron cabinet. I wish I had the room for so many cabinets, and I wish arcades were a viable business model (Dave and Busters aside) to play with these old machines.

I've been postponing building my own for some time now for one reason only. Monitor! There are three issues that bug me. First, I really like CRTs, but I can live without one. Second, I wan't a big 4:3 and that is not going to happen. There are some 16:10 options, but not as big as 16:9. Third, which is more important to me, is that I want an elegant cabinet with rotating monitor that rotates between horizontal and vertical (tate) mode. This is important for shmups which I enjoy playing. Until I resolve this, I won't go forward.

If anyone is wondering what Tate Mode might be, "tate" is a Japanese word that indicates the property of standing up, or being upright. It is pronounced tah-tay.

Indeed. It essentially means "vertical," and English-speaking arcade fans use it when they mean "vertical," for some reason.

Have you considered a Candy cab? They typically have 29" CRTs and can be rotated. Although for most candies rotating is very labor intensive. The Taito Egret 2 has a rotation mechanism, but is in mega demand because of it.

Candies are nice because they are the real deal ("Candy" is a general term used to describe Japanese arcade cabinets made by Sega, Konami, Taito, etc) and are simply wonderful machines.

Yes! Candies have this sorted out, though you have to open the front 'hood' and rotate the thing. They are gorgeous even.

We still buy a few CRT monitors from time to time (museum field) and get them from Dotronix. Not cheap, but you can get big ones:

http://www.dotronix.com/dnrSeries.html

Are those new, as in still in production? If so, that's fascinating.

Yes.

If you're willing to take some liberties with historical accuracy, you can get extremely high quality CRT monitors that were used for broadcast work for cheap on ebay (Sony BVM series, the 20 inch models are easily available). Those are really impressive, but they're not really "how the games were meant to look", because they had costs at least one order of magnitude higher than the parts actually used in arcade cabinets.

I actually have several, since I work in film and tv and got them for free when we switched over to new stuff. :) See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374224 They are heavy, real heavy though.

A few years ago I built a cabinet for my family. I used equipment purchased off of Ultimarc (https://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html), did the woodworking myself. I'm a very inexperienced amateur woodworker, but I love doing it. It's a fantastic hobby to contrast against a day of programming.

Here's a photo album of the process. I picked up the Donkey Kong marquee later as a gift for my wife at Christmas time - she's the Donkey Kong Pro in our household.

Of course, when I look at it - I only see the flaws. I'd love to get a second shot at building it!

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0Q5qXGF1OaZiJ

Well done, looks great!

Don't worry, I work in a structural steel fabrication workshop - everyone only ever sees the flaws.

Here's mine:

http://imgur.com/a/hzE1x#0

One way to add a more "authentic" feel on an LCD (but isn't very cheap) is to use a scanline generator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vscKaVByjRU

For a step by step on building an arcade box check out iliketomakestuff.com. Lots of fun woodworking projects on his site.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K3QXLQ1UXqs

I would like to hear everyone's opinions of the various UIs for MAME. I've been searching for a hands-off, games only interface for choosing, one where it won't accidentally quit or pop up the control config window during gameplay, and frankly, every MAME front end I have ever used is terrible in a completely unique way.

Have you tried/IV Play? http://www.mameui.info/

I've found MALA to fit my needs quite well, but I'm sure you've already tried it. I was going to post a link, but Chrome is giving me a malware warning on the site now. It's definitely not "hands-off," as I wanted an LCARS display from Star Trek The Next Generation on it, and had to spend an hour positioning the sceenshots and title lists for my monitor dimensions in their cyrptic config files (Is this the variable I want to change? No. What about this one? No.)... and then go through all that again when I changed my monitor dimensions.

So yeah... Now that I think about it, MALA kinda sucks. What do others recommend?

install ubuntu on a machine, then install retropie[0] or Ice[1].

0. https://retropie.org.uk/download/ 1. https://github.com/scottrice/Ice

I have the same tankstick and cabinet setup, but as another poster mentioned, use an RPi3 to power it all with RetroPie. The tankstick is best on a powered USB hub, and that leaves you with enough options for a USB drive and a hidden mouse/keyboard for setup/maintenance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com