Current Status of Project

As of October 2021, the status of this build is:

• The main cabinet is complete and scheduled for painting
• The design of the various decals for the main deck and the sides of the cabinet is complete; just waiting on time to get around to printing them.
• Core software build (uBuntu 20.04LTS with Retropie and others) is complete
• Hardware has been tested thoroughly with 2 USB encoders for dual joysticks and three buttons
• Additional configuration is still required for the additional 2 player joysticks and the various configuration templates for the games that support 2,3,4 and up to 6 buttons
• Reverse the layout of the stick and buttons back to a favoured right-handed layout of the stick.
• The physical wiring of the cabinet is pending painting of the cabinet.
• Posting of the configs for Retropie TBD
• Uploading/sharing of the plans for the cabinet TBD
• Uploading/sharing of the wiring diagram TBD

Design Goals

As mentioned above, I have wanted to build a fun multi-purpose cabinet since the 90s and have experimented with a little of this.

This project had more formal goals, they are:

• Build a 4 player cabinet (there are some classic 4 player games that I wanted to be able to invite some friends over to play against)
• Have the cabinet be usable as a pinball setup with front bumper style buttons, with a slightly inclined deck
• The cabinet should include audio/visual bling to replicate the feel and ambiance of the player cabinets I grew up with.
  • That means bells, whistles, coloured lights, buzzers, and translucent header logo.
  • Use modern technology (such as LED multicolour lighting strips) to replicate old school style.
• Include the ability to have USB pluggable NES, SNES, Sega Genesis and Playstation 2 style controllers so that older games could be played without the classic joystick/buttons.
• Include a “reasonable” sized screen for the cabinet – so many of these builds use large TVs in the cabinets for max effect; however, most CRT-driven cabinets rarely had a 4:3 screen larger than 19 inches (not a 42 inch or larger LCD).  I ended up reusing an older 22 inch Dell TouchScreen LCD as a compromise, which has the added functionality of driving the interface without a keyboard and mouse!
• A decision was made NOT to utilize modern coil operated slots, instead opting for the “insert coin” button on the central console deck.

Hardware and Software

When I started with this project, like most articles on the web, I started with a Raspberry Pi as the core machine and used RetroPie as the distribution.

While a Pi3 was powerful for many of the older emulators, I quickly found that the Pi struggles to do additional advanced tasks.

I just happened to have an 8th gen Core i5 sitting around and decided to move the project to that hardware.  Given that I have older HTPC hardware that is due to be replaced, this current machine doubles down as my HTPC.

Hardware:

• 8th Generation Core i5
• 16GB RAM
• Internal GPU (I had other Nvidia and Radeon cards lying around; however, I found the internal GPU more than sufficient and why waste the power while generating extra heat)
• NVMe SSD

Software:

• Linux, not any form of Windows (in this case Ubuntu 20.04LTS with Wine)
• RetroPie x86
• KODI