Woodshed Bartop (Craigslist find)

[Slippyblade]

Guy on Craigslist selling a bundle of parts.  This was apparently one of those multi-year projects that his wife got sick of seeing so she told him to get rid of it.  I paid $100 for the bundle.  Not too bad in my opinion.

Stuff it included:
Bartop shell (solid wood, not ply or MDF)
6 Red buttons
2 White buttons
1 Blue button
1 & 2 Player buttons
--- All have cherry switches
3 Translucent red leaf switch buttons
5 Panel mount buttons
2 8-way sticks (Not sure of exact make - but they are very Happ-like)
Sparkfun style PS2 trackball
IPac-2
LED-Wiz
Gateway laptop w/broken screen hinges
Computer (no case, but all parts)
LCD (Haven't measured yet, but it's about 19-20" widescreen)

Bunch of stuff to play with.  Started sorting and shuffling bits and parts.

[Slippyblade]

Decided I'd go with a single player design since the cab is kinda small.  Doing a two stick layout with 6 buttons between.  By kids LOVE Smash TV and Battlezone.  The cab looks like it was designed after a Weecade, but it is even tighter inside than normal.  The laptop won't fit even after stripping it down as much as possible.  Gonna try the comp mobo tonight.  Might just shove a R-Pi in there and be done with it.

[ChanceKJ]

  Nice save.


Put an RPi in there and silence some haters.

[JDFan]

Out of curiosity does Robotron play well on the r-pi ??

[Slippyblade]

Don't know yet.  I'll let ya know. 

[jaharr01]

Hey Slippyblade that finish on that look pretty good from the pic how does it look  close up?

[Slippyblade]

Like I stated it's solid wood, not ply.  The previous owner finished it pretty well, some kind of urethane I think.  It looks really nice.  That's why I'm calling it the Woodshed.

[RetroGreg]

Man, he was on the final stretch too. Bummer for him. Great find though! 

[Slippyblade]

This was a back burner project for the guy.  He's got a full size cab in his office in the house already so he's not exactly missing out. 

Huh.  Apparently Emulation Station doesn't like ROMs to be zipped or compressed in any way.  I guess that makes sense considering the low memory on the Pi.

Ok, maybe I'm just tired.  Maybe I need to double check my wiring.  I'm running RetroPie.  Loaded up a few random system's ROMS and everything is working except for one catch.  After a couple minutes, it just freezes up. LED's on the keyboard won't respond.  LED on the KADE is still lit, so there is power going to it still, but nothing responds and I have to power cycle the Pi. 

Maybe I just need to go to sleep and work on it again later.

[Slippyblade]

Hmm, something that just occurred to me.  Memory lock.  I'm using a very small card and RetroPie and a handful of ROMs literally fills the card.  I wonder if that's my locking up problem?  Hmmm...  to the store!

[jugger18]

I know when I used emulation station on a PC I had to edit the ini file to explicitly list all rom types.  Zips worked fine

[Slippyblade]

Well then, don't I feel stupid.  I hadn't expanded the file system yet, so I was literally against the wall memory wise.  No more freezing - though I still need to fetch a larger card.  The 4gb I've got in there now sure as hell isn't large enough. 

Oh yeah, Cadash isn't supported on MAME4All???  Grrr.

[nitrogen_widget]

Well then, don't I feel stupid.  I hadn't expanded the file system yet, so I was literally against the wall memory wise.  No more freezing - though I still need to fetch a larger card.  The 4gb I've got in there now sure as hell isn't large enough. 

Oh yeah, Cadash isn't supported on MAME4All???  Grrr.

Final Burn Alpha may support it.

[Slippyblade]

So, to answer a previous question, Robotron runs great on a Pi.

I've decided not to use the Pi in this project though.  Not because it doesn't run well, it does, but because finding a ROMset that works on the versions of MAME built into RetroPIe is a pain in the ass.  Because of that and the fact that I've too much other stuff going on right now to be bothered with cobbling it together, I'm just cramming a laptop into the cab.  Had to do some bandsaw work on the LCD casing to make everything fit, but it finally came together.  I think later on I'll just shove the Pi into one of the NES shells I've got sitting around and use it as a couch console.

After wiring everything up and getting it assembled, I was getting nothing but a black screen from MAME.  Changed the .ini to use ddraw and it's working now. 

[Slippyblade]

Ok, emulators installed.  It's got:

Gameboy
Gameboy Color
Gameboy Advanced
NES
SNES
Master System
Genesis
32X
MAME

Got all the console ROMS installed, filtering down a decent MAME set currently.  The comp has a 60gb SSD in it, so I don't wanna install the complete set.

[Slippyblade]

Been a while since the last update.  Lot has happened, most of it annoying.  Turns out the carcass I am working with was just built to tight inside.  Even the laptop mobo didn't fit right.  Tried a couple different ITX mobos in various orientations with no luck.  Got one to fit, but when the cab was closed up, things were too tight and there just wasn't enough airflow.  Result, overheat and shutdown.  Crap.

Also, I decided to dump Emulation Station.  I started playing around with Attract Mode and I've fallen in love with it.  First off, it is cross compatible between Windows, Linux, and Raspberry Pi so I can use the same program with the same layouts regardless of platform.  Secondly, the scripting is awesome.  I was initially turned off by needing to pick up another language just to make a layout, but the amount of scripting it takes to do something like a normal Mala layout is about a dozen lines of code.  The fact that is supports transparency, video, animation, etc is just gravy.  Had a few stumbling blocks with getting it working right - but all my issues boiled down to learning a new piece of software.

Due to the stupidly tight space inside this cab, I've gone back to using a Pi.  I'm not using the RetroPie distro though, I am using DietPi with a variety of emulators to fit the bill.  Started dumping ROMs, snaps, and box images this morning and everything is going smooth except for one snag.  Seems that my distro didn't like the exact flavor of PNG I saved a lot of my images in; converting those in to JPEG fixed that issue.  The PNG's with transparency that I needed for the layout now work by simply opening them on the Pi and then just clicking the save button.  Doesn't seem to change the file size or anything, but they display correctly afterward.

[Slippyblade]

Finished.  What a pain in the ass.

The confines of this cab were in such a way that almost nothing fit right.  I finally put the bare laptop back inside, it's running Ubuntu with Attract Mode as the FE.  I wired it up internally with RetroArch for the console emulators and a current version of MAME for the arcade stuff.  I've got no pics of the work in progress because it frustrated me so badly I forgot to snap them. 

I'm gonna write this one off as a "C" project at best.  Not CrapMAME, but definitely not worth a bookmark.

[yotsuya]

Nice save.


Put an RPi in there and silence some haters.

Finished.  What a pain in the ass.

The confines of this cab were in such a way that almost nothing fit right.  I finally put the bare laptop back inside, it's running Ubuntu with Attract Mode as the FE.  .

[Slippyblade]

Yeah - the Pi would have fit physically.  But some of the games that I wanted were not supported by the MAME versions available.

[dmckean]

Let's see some pics, I want to see how cramped everything ended up.

[Slippyblade]

No pics, it's embarassing.  Put it this way, I had to carve some grooves in the wood for the wires to route around in.  90 degree adapters would have helped, but I didn't have any and didn't wanna spend money.  The P1 and P2 buttons have an extra spacer put in because they were pushing against the bottom of the joystick shafts.  Bunch of stupid stuff like that.  If the base had been 1" taller or the back 1" deeper, it would have been fine...