About

I needed a project for the summer of 2016 and I watched a video by I Like to Make Stuff. I really like old arcade games and decided to build my own bar-top arcade cabinet.

I didn't want to use a kit so we just went to our local hardware store and bought a sheet of MDF. The entire cabinet has been built around a monitor with built-in speakers which I had for spare. So I measured everything on the wood, therefore I can't provide you with the blueprints or anything. My dad helped me cut out the wood using a table saw.

Because I only had 10 buttons to connect to the Pi, I just used an old IDE cable to connect them. The monitor only had DVI, so that is connected to the Pi via an adapter and a regular Aux cable for sound. I also made a banner above the screen. Just printed out an image on thin paper, pasted it on some acrylic glass and put some bright white LEDs behind it.

At first, the cabinet ran on my old Raspberry Pi 1, but it was to slow to emulate anything newer than the SNES so I bought the Raspberry Pi 3 instead. It now runs RetroPie using the Adafruit Retrogame library to get input from the buttons. And it can emulate almost anything up to the Nintendo 64.