Two (2) Player Cocktail Arcade

[rmikes213]

After creating a single player, 2 button bartop arcade for my father as a Christmas present (so he could play Galaga!), I decided to make myself something even cooler that everyone could enjoy: a 2 player cocktail arcade. So after a week or so of brainstorming, gathering parts, and experimenting, I order my buttons, got some wood, and got to work.

Spoiler: Single Player Bartop Aracde


I don't have a detailed log of what I did, but if you have any questions after looking at the pictures don't be afraid to ask me.









It's all running on an old T60 Thinkpad and spare TV. I bought one of the KeyWiz encoders from GroovyGameGear along with the buttons and joystick. I have a few USB fans in there to cool the thing down, and all the power cords are plugged into an extension chord that I run to the wall.

After about a year of use, I wanted to make it more accessible to people who weren't comfortable sitting on the floor to play, so I made a makeshift wooden stand to sit it in. It sits about 3 feet? off the ground, so right around coffee table height.

[micahman33]

Nice build man. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that one monitor split in half so each player sees the same screen on their end? Thats pretty genius if I'm seeing it correctly. I love the table top designs, but was always hesitant about building one because I would miss out on a lot of the non-vertical monitor games. Good solution

[CoryBee]

Nice build man. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that one monitor split in half so each player sees the same screen on their end? Thats pretty genius if I'm seeing it correctly. I love the table top designs, but was always hesitant about building one because I would miss out on a lot of the non-vertical monitor games. Good solution

That is a feature (video option) of later MAME versions 

[monkeychunkuk]

Was size is the monitor?
With the monitor mounted like that does it nit squish the screen when playing single player mode?

[rmikes213]

Yea, it's meant to play like a cocktail cabinet, and the Mame version I'm using let's you set the video to cocktail which duplicates the screen on both sides for both players. It's pretty awesome. I actually keep almost all the games in cocktail mode because it fills out the entire screen and keeps the aspect ration nice. The only games I had to get tricky with were the vertical shooters which took up the whole screen on their own - the cocktail video mode would split the screen vertically and make the screen really small. So I would leave it as is and reverse the player 2 controls so they could essentially look from the top of the screen and still control their ship correctly.

I use Mala as the front end, and have it oriented vertically so Player 1 can choose the game.