The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Main => Project Announcements => Topic started by: Gilrock on March 12, 2021, 03:14:48 pm
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Every so often I see builds around here and think "Wow...I want to make one of those!". Well this was one of them and I finally did it. I was browsing the Hall of Fame thread one day and this one stood out to me. A couple years ago I had made a bartop from those $5 GeekPub plans but I never really liked the cheap buttons and joysticks I had bought for it. It had a 2 player setup with way too many buttons and I could never remember which button I had setup to do what. So I decided to gut that bartop and reuse the monitor, speakers, Raspberry Pi, zero delay encoder board and a few miscellaneous electrical parts/cables. My monitor is a lot wider than what was in that hall of fame build and I also wanted to keep the buttons simple with 3 instead of 6 so I ended up having to spend about 8 hours redesigning the entire bartop but using his plans as a guidance helped quite a bit. I also had to rework all the artwork. He provides a link to the plans if anyone else wants to copy like I did. I also mentioned to my personal trainer what I was building and he wanted one for his family so I ended up building two identical copies except I gave him my old stuff I pulled out of the old bartop and bought new stuff for mine. Its running RetroPie and works really nice. I would like to also shoot a video of it to show how nice it works.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,133712.0.html (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,133712.0.html)
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Excellent job. Would love to see a video walkthrough, including the boot sequence.
What size monitor did you use? I can't quite tell ow big the cabinet is. 3 buttons is perfect. My one regret on my bartop is I went with 6. Completely unnecessary.
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Well look at that. It doesn't have 70 buttons, and it doesn't light up like a Christmas tree.
Nice job.
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Excellent job. Would love to see a video walkthrough, including the boot sequence.
What size monitor did you use? I can't quite tell ow big the cabinet is. 3 buttons is perfect. My one regret on my bartop is I went with 6. Completely unnecessary.
This is the monitor I used. Probably a little pricey for a bartop but it was the once called for in the original GeekPub plans so I just bought a second one to match since I was building two of them.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0148NNKTC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0148NNKTC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
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Very Nice!
Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk
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Very nice Gil. I like the start/select buttons, it really sells the NES controller feel. Great work
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Looks great! Well done! :cheers: How did you fabricate the 3d marquee?
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Looks great! Well done! :cheers: How did you fabricate the 3d marquee?
I had a local plastic shop laser cut the Nintendo letters. Although the "N" they gave me turned out to have chipped corners so I cut the one you see here freehand on a scrollsaw.
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How do verticle games look on that since it's mounted horizontal?
Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk
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I love this cabinet.
Stylish homage with no ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- and great fit and finish.
What's not to love?
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How do verticle games look on that since it's mounted horizontal?
Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk
The monitor is big enough I like the vertical games. I've played ones like 1942 and Donkey Kong. I've got it setup so there are nice bezel graphics that take up the space on the side but do not shrink the screen vertically at all. And the nice thing with RetroPie is its pretty easy to set that stuff up. RetroPie has some of the best online documentation. You just run a script and it downloads and installs all the graphics. The real winner for me was when I figured out how to get scanline filters running. Ghouls and Ghosts looks pretty awesome with the scanlines. Again it was just finding the option buried down in a menu and the online help led me how to do it. Its been nicer to setup than figuring out how to coordinate RocketLauncher with BigBox running Mame. The most confusing thing I've found really isn't anything to do with RetroPie its that darn RetroArch config stuff. The way RetroArch does controller configuration is nuts to figure out. By default RetroArch was doing strange button mappings and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out which buttons needed to be mapped to what.
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A few more photos of some games and additional loading screens. BTW my loading screens have motion. I made them so the center image pulses in size a few times so the display does not appear to be frozen while waiting.
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Here's a cropped section of Ghouls and Ghosts to show the scanlines:
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Looks nice. What NES games do you play with arcade controls? There is a somewhat new game called Micro Mages for NES that is really fun plus all the classics (SMB, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc.) but that's all I'm really familiar with. I'm sure there are a lot of "hidden gems" I never played when I was a kid...
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Looks nice. What NES games do you play with arcade controls? There is a somewhat new game called Micro Mages for NES that is really fun plus all the classics (SMB, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc.) but that's all I'm really familiar with. I'm sure there are a lot of "hidden gems" I never played when I was a kid...
I'm not even sure what games I put on there. I think I did a search for the top 20 games and tried to get all of those running. I'll admit I spend more time building than playing. I've used the control panel for Super Mario but I also have reproduction NES controllers that plug into those front USB ports.
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Nice!!
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Pretty spot on build! Out of curiosity why did you omit the Power/Reset buttons? And how do you now exit out of a game?
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Pretty spot on build! Out of curiosity why did you omit the Power/Reset buttons? And how do you now exit out of a game?
Thanks...I just didn't think I needed those buttons. I've used a Pi running RetroPie as well as a Mister FPGA in this now and both setups I was able to configure Select + Start 2 button combo to exit games. Well actually on Mister that brings up the OSD menu which lets you switch cores or reset. I know you were mimic'ing the original console but I just wanted to keep the buttons to a minimum.