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Adding to that...

 You do realize, that the Real reason why companies are over-pricing hardware... is most likely a combination of
Inflation (that the radicals actually created), Blackrock Losses (Due to DEI), And ECO-Radical pushes.

- Eco Radicals would LOVE to get rid of High End graphic cards.. because they eat up a lot of Power.
 
- Radical Feminists, would also love to get rid of Gaming... because they dont like games, AND... they believe
that Guns in games, is also Bad influence.  Also, they hate Men having fun... and not spending their every waking
minute... slaving away for woman, in some shape or form.

- All major companies, are lead by fellow Radical / Globalists Cultists.  They will continue to push their Agenda's,
and self destruct, as they Double down on their BS.

 The true Death of  AAA  gaming... has came in the form of Misandrists taking over the companies, as well as DEI initiatives (Hiring based on Skin Tone, or Gender, rather than Raw Talent and proven good Work History).

 Every story and dialogue is Childish, Trash.
 Every character is an Obnoxious Female Boss-wItch
 Every well known character is Race or Gender Swapped
 Every Female character is modeled to look more Masculine and Ugly
 Every Male character, is made to be more feminine, and or Inferior to the Female Characters

 And then there is the whole "Rainbow Agenda" also being forced onto gamers... Where every character is explicitly Gay.

 I could go on and on... But the fact is... If you want decent games to play... you seek out Indy Studious.
Not Blackrock funded DEI corpos, that are over-ran by Radical Feminists, and Radical Rainbow Mafia Cultists

Bit of an update here - the cabinet is now about 98% complete, needing only the addition of dust filters and exterior trim bezels for the intake vents in the base. I will try to get some good photos of it uploaded in the next couple of days. I will say that it has cleaned up remarkably well, and its function/performance has exceeded my expectations. Chuffed.

I haven't shown much of the internals of the cab yet, and now is as good a time as any for a rundown. Below are some work-in progress photos from an earlier date - please excuse the poor lighting and sawdust/debris, and keep in mind that wire management hadn't really been attempted at this point.



The PC powering this build is a Firebat T8 (Intel N100 Alder Lake) mini running what is basically a stripped down Linux installation. Although it's a very low-power PC with integrated graphics, after installing a lot of tables and doing a lot of playtesting I've found that it really works quite well at 1080p/60Hz resolution. If you're contemplating a build using one of these, I'd say that it works great so long as you're not trying to push 4K.

Some of the early testing I had done was with more recent tables (such as those from VPW) set up for 4K high-refresh monitors, and some of those ran pretty poorly - typically 20-30fps or so. Using some of the less hyper-detailed VPX tables as alternates, performance has been fine and totally playable with solid framerates and more than acceptable display quality.

This is a screenshot of btop (a system monitor application) running via ssh from my desktop computer, with the pinball cab running Monster Bash in a game session with multiball active. The little N100 4-core system is chugging right along at 16% utilization. The only time I see CPU utilization approach even 50% is during game selection and loading from the frontend; at the left of the CPU histogram the burst of activity shown is the game being selected and loaded:



The mini PC's cooling solution is pretty tightly integrated in its very small case, with an intake fan that draws air in from the bottom and exhausts through one side. It didn't make much sense to decase the PC for this build as it would lose the benefit of what's basically a fitted duct channeling air directly through the CPU heatsink. The PC has been oriented so that its exhaust is mostly inline with the cabinet's exhaust fan, but it's rotated slightly out of plane in order to keep all of the i/o ports more easily accessible.

I needed to break out a couple of functions from the motherboard in order for it to function seamlessly in the cabinet, but this was definitely made trickier due to the very tight packaging of components inside the mini PC case. I went with a 3-pin audio cable with the JST connectors snipped off the ends to solder to the motherboard V+ and ground contacts for the power switch, and to the +5V lead for the cooling fan header. A small hole was drilled in the case to allow passage for the cable:



The PC is powered by a laptop-style switching power brick, but this one is 12V rather than the more common 19.5V laptop power supplies. Since the PC only needs 12V, I was able to power the relay module used to run the cabinet's exhaust fan without stepping the voltage down before it reaches the relay. Instead, a buck converter was installed on the output side of the relay to act as a fan speed controller of sorts. The relay is triggered by the +5V signal coming from the mini PC's fan header, and output voltage to the cabinet's exhaust fan was adjusted to ~7.8V for best acoustics. System temperature hasn't exceeded ~65C in testing so far:



There was a need for multiple +5V outputs to power the amplifier board, DMD screen, and various button LEDs, and I spent some time thinking about how to manage those. The SJ@JX USB encoder is "capable" of supporting about a dozen LEDs on its own, but the cabinet didn't need quite that many. I considered using some of those encoder outputs to power the amplifier and DMD, but had some concerns about combined amperages and ground loops. Rooting around in a junk drawer netted a handful of small 1 amp USB AC adapters which were pressed into service to power the amplifier and DMD instead, and these are plugged into the power strip mounted into the rear of the cab.

In the photo below the button LEDs are plugged into the +5V encoder outputs, but I've switched those up based on the desired behavior of the system when different power states are taken into account. By default all of the USB ports are powered during suspend, and while there may be a BIOS switch to alter that behavior I've decided that it's actually easier to handle what I want to do in hardware instead:



Typical for this sort of installation, the PC is set to suspend/hibernate with a short press of the power button, and it shuts down with a long press. The power button is illuminated, and its conditionals for lighting pretty much follow what the encoder board outputs during suspend and power-off, so it alone is powered from the encoder. The control panel button LEDs instead receive their power from my fan control circuit so that they only illuminate when the system is active.

Most i/o to the cabinet is handled wirelessly with a bluetooth keyboard, RF wireless mouse, and a PS3 controller connected via BT to remotely navigate Emulation Station menus. I threw a 4-port USB extender into the cab mainly for convenient reach to plug in USB thumbdrives for bulk file transfer.

I hope to post photos of the more or less completed unit tomorrow or the next day 

Manama

A 24gb VRAM card can comfortably run a lot of different AI-related applications.  Which ones are up to you.  But if the 24gb card in question is an older Titan, then it might not be very quick while doing them.

Which brings me to the next observation about the 5000 line.  The xx70 cards were always the "sweet spot" for gamers, offering good performance and a reasonable price.  However, the 5070 appears to be slated to cost ~$700, with the rumored performance of a 4070 Super or 3090 in most tasks.  The hitch is that $700 will easily get you a gently used RTX 3090 with double the amount of VRAM as that of the 5070.  It's difficult to look at this situation and not see it as Nvidia intentionally hobbling the high-priced mid-tier in order to keep it out of the AI market.  At minimum, the 5070 should have been a 16gb card and the 5080 should be 24gb.

The only real bump in the 5000 series consumer cards is the 5090 with 32gb of VRAM.  But the $2500 projected price tag will be keeping it out of the hands of all but the most avid and wealthy consumers.  Part of me thinks that these are targeted toward Semi-professional and hardcore AI enthusiasts, as well as "back-door" sales to the Chinese government, where the GPU and memory chips are stripped off from consumer cards to be used in their AI server farms.  It's a lot harder to keep track of where consumer goods end up than direct B2B sales.  It's no coincidence that the piles of GPU and VRAM-less 3090 cards being sold on ebay for parts are all coming from China.     

Incredibly sad news. RIP mate, and massive thanks for your amazing contributions to this hobby.

I bought some really expensive video card awhile back.  It’s hooked up to 1080P monitor and I use that computer to browse eBay and post here.  24GB of ram or some ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---.  Can I somehow use it to make Cindy Crawford deep fakes? 

Very clean install! As someone going through a lot of setup stuff right now, I really appreciate having a dedicated space for keyboard and mouse. I think I've dropped my mouse at least half a dozen times in the last 24 hours alone.

I know this is an old sticky, but this approach may help others.  I run Batocera on my Pi3, but you should be able to configure this on any other distribution.

This assume a momentary push button to shutdown and then if desired, startup the Pi.

1. Connect your push button across physical pins 6 and 5 on the Pi GPIO as shown (credit to https://gilyes.com/pi-shutdown-button/)
2. Edit your /boot/config.txt and add this line (check no others load the overlay):

dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=3,active_low=1,gpio_pull=up

3. Install or run triggerhappy daemon.  This will handle the KEYPOWER event that the above overlay generates.  If you have batocera installed, Triggerhappy (thd) is running by default with instructions to configure your own multimedia.conf to handle the KEYPOWER event (that is - you don't need to do anymore.  Batocera will startup and shutdown when you press your button):

https://github.com/wertarbyte/triggerhappy

4. Add the following to your multimedia.conf file

KEY_POWER       1   /sbin/shutdown -h now

Hi there,

This is my first and only (does anyone ever stop at just one? project.  I'm excited (as we all are) and keen to share for others, incase this design of interest.

Goals:
1. Sit down cabinet to have long playing sessions (too old to stand for long these days)
2. Side-by-side instead of cocktail.  This allows for beat 'em up and shooter (e.g. Gauntlet) playing
3. Play a variety of consoles - conventional arcade, home consoles/computers (I have long had a love affair with my c64 and vic20), laserdisc games (I have Space Ace and Dragons Lair on DVD)
4. Support coin slot play to make as original as possible
5. Decent sound (custom speaker design)

I welcome any criticism, questions etc... It's all about anticipating problems and fixing them before hammer hits wood.

I've attached sketchup mockups and the built mock panel.  I'm using the Sega Astro City button layout.

The system will run Batocera on a Pi 3b+

Buttons are as follows:
Purple = Select (hotkey for other functions e.g. volume, MAME menu, save state etc...)
Start = Start (multi-function - hold 2 seconds to quit emulator / game)
24mm green = coin for each player
Player 1 / 2 start (as depicted)

Joystick spacing is a little wider to buttons for each player.  I found this more comfortable than crossing arms.  You can see the centre line between joystick and buttons for each player = human body centre when playing.

There's about 500mm space between player centres.  I found this is sufficient room without banging elbows (unless one beats the other! - then it's a simple stretch).

I'll be using a 4:3 HP 20" monitor to maintain the viewing ratio typical of consoles/arcade games of the period.  The monitor will be mounted using the VESA panel on the monitor.

I have it all working.  I've tuned the buttons, scripts and emulators so it is all pretty fluid.

An on/off push button will be placed by the amp (you can see the mockup below the control panel, above the coin slot).

I'll add switches to enable coin for player1/2 so you can toggle (or both) for adding credits.

I'm happy to provide a parts list - location for purchase if helpful.