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Gaming Articles, Project Arcade

Project: Arcade – Day 1

I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty with my Arcade project, but thankfully age has taught me to be patient and so rather than rushing to the store to buy wood and electronics for my dream machine living in my head, I opted to sit down in front of my computer and contend with the reality of this project.

I thought it prudent to create some goals for the project which I hope in turn will help me stay organized, give me an idea where to start, and perhaps guide at least some of the decisions I would have to make. It may not seem like it but there are actually quite a few practical considerations to be made here.

I’m an IT guy, solution architect to be exact and creating goals for projects before you start is as much a habit for me as it is the single most important step to the success of any project. 2 decades of experience teaches me that skipping this step leads to disaster!

The Goals

When I was thinking about the goals for this project, by the time I got halfway through the list, I already knew that this was actually extremely helpful and I strongly suggest you do the same if you are considering building your own arcade. This list I think will become the key to getting this project does successfully.

Goal 1: Modular, Portable, and Versatile
The door to my office has a 70-centimeter width worth of clearance and I have had trouble getting certain types of furniture in and out of this room before. I want the arcade unit to be something that can be disassembled and reassembled into smaller pieces.

Furthermore, I don’t want the arcade unit to be limited to being plugged into the monitor and cabinet for which it’s built. What I mean is that I want the controller board to be something I can remove and take upstairs and plug it into my TV for example and still function exactly as it does when plugged into the cabinet. There are a lot of kids in my family, we are always having lots of events at my house and I want to be able to set this up for the kids during these events so they can play video games together without having to pack them into my office.

This is a self contained arcade controller that plugs directly into a TV, its construction will be the inspiration for the custom one I will build.

Also in the future, if I decide to upgrade the cabinet (bigger monitor for example), I don’t want to have to rebuild an entire cabinet to do this.

This thing will also take the place of an entire bookshelf in my office and arcade cabinets kind of have a habit of being large pieces of furniture that take up space from what I can see. I want at least some part of this cabinet to be a functional storage space.

Bar Top units like this one can easily be turned into a stand up unit just by building something for it to sit on. The difference in my design is that the controller will be removable from what will effectively be a bar top unit sitting on top of a cabinet stand.

As such the cabinet should be 3 pieces. The top unit will house the Marquee, Monitor, and speakers. The controller unit (Joysticks, buttons etc..) will be a self-contained entertainment system that can be removed from the cabinet and plugged into a TV (so it needs to have some portability), and the stand which I want to double as a storage space with shelves.

Goal 2: Furniture, Not Arcade Look
Ok so this might sound strange but while I definitely want this thing to be a good and proper arcade cabinet, I don’t want to turn my office into something from the movie BIG. What I mean is that I have a motif in my office where there is an effort to make the room coordinated (a bit sophisticated like grown-up lives here) and despite all the board games and miniatures everywhere, it very clearly is an office and not a playroom. I’ve gone to great lengths to keep it that way and I want the arcade unit to meld into this room so it looks like it belongs in here as if it’s a piece of furniture like everything else in the room.

We will be avoiding bright colors or a bunch of arcade art. The Marquee for example should be subtle, I might even avoid art altogether on the sides of the arcade. I want this cabinet to almost be invisible when you walk in here as if it was a bookshelf and only under closer inspection do you realize, ok wow, there is an Arcade Cabinet in here.

Don’t get me wrong, the kid inside me wants one, but my wife will divorce me if I bring something this bright into my office. I’m a grown-up (for the most part), my arcade cabinet will be a “grown up” arcade cabinet with a lot more subtlety.

Achieving that look will be part of the thought going into this construction of the Cabinet.

Goal 3: Versatile Controller
A lot of energy will go into creating the most versatile controller possible to allow for the widest range of games to be played with the original controller schemes. The controller board itself will need to be relatively large and spacious and while I need it to be as portable and light as possible, I want to make sure this versatility takes precedence. I don’t mind it being bulky, I don’t think I will be detaching/attaching it often enough for it to be an issue. Far more important to me is functionality.

This means the following list of items need to be part of the controller

  • 2 Player setup in the center with a 8-way controller and 8 button setup
  • 2 additional player setups with an 8-way controller and 6 button setup (Making this a 4 player controller).
  • 1 player setup for a 4-way controller
  • 1 player setup for a trackball
  • 1 player setup for a Spinner
  • 1, 2, 3 & 4 player buttons
  • 4 Function buttons (for things like reseting the unit, volume control and stuff like that)

I don’t doubt this will be a challenge, everything from choosing materials to wiring. It’s a long list of demands but I believe with some clever consideration I will be able to achieve this goal.

This is pretty close to the layout that I’m going for, though I think this might be a bit over-designed and too big, so I may need to make some cuts here, however, this has everything I’m looking for.

Since the controller needs to be a self-contained entertainment system, I will need to ensure that the computer that runs this arcade lives inside this controller, as such, it will have to be something small and compact. The most likely candidate for this is going to be a Raspberry Pi.

Goal 4: Testing the System
While of course, I want to be able to play the most diverse list of games on this arcade cabinet I can muster, I want this to be a “classic” arcade system and I don’t really care about its ability to replicate a bunch of consoles. That said I considered the “era” of arcade games here as well as obviously what performance I can get out of the unit is going to dictate what games I can play on it. All considerations aside, I doubt anything post-’90s will be played on this thing, it will be for the most part a Mame Arcade unit to play games I doubt would have any trouble running on a Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a tight, compact, mini PC and seems to be generally what goes into Arcade Cabinets. It can be done with actual PC’s and there are some good reasons to do so, but given my design, it seems the decision to use a Raspberry Pi is all but made for me.

I will of course need to test everything none the less, no reason to leave anything up to chance. One of the goals in the early part of the project will be to create a temporary setup for testing the functionality of the Pi and setup that will go into the final unit and use that as a guide for adjustments.

For example are 8 buttons really necessary for the 2 player setup? How many games actually use a 4-way controller or a spinner? Stuff like that I hope will be revealed by testing everything in advance. Other considerations like overclocking, heat generation (do I need a fan), the weight of components, and cabling complications. All of these things I want to test so that I get some self-reflective guidance for the final product. After all, I have no experience building arcade cabinets or arcade systems and while there are plenty of great guides online, I can see that most of these projects have varied goals that don’t necessarily line up with mine.

Goal 5: A Guide To Future Projects
I can’t say for certain but I suspect that this will be the first but not the last arcade cabinet I will build. There are a few young kids in my family who will want one the moment they see what I have created and I foresee some Bar Top builds in my future as Birthday and Christmas presents.

As such, I will be creating some alternative designs as I go, so while I will only build one cabinet, for now, I will be designing some variations for future builds and documenting them so that when I pick those projects up in the future, hopefully, this process will feel less like a “start from scratch” thing.

Conclusion

I’m not sure the first day of my project was all that productive, I didn’t actually do anything, mostly I just thought about the project and made a list of goals. This has certainly given me a lot to think about from a design perspective and I think over the next week I will be putting pen to paper and mocking up some designs for the cabinet.

Not entirely sure how helpful this article has been if you are like me, getting ready to build your cabinet, but I can say that for me, making a list of goals like this was actually extremely helpful. It has given me a rough vision and some targets I want to hit and that in turn will help me to make decisions on how to proceed.

In my next article, I will post some of the designs I will be working on in the coming days and hopefully that will lead me to some initial decisions. I want to get this project into my workshop as I’m eager to turn this dream into a reality.

Project Arcade

PROJECT: ARCADE

I have been a gamer of one type or another since I was 10 years old and my father bought me an 8 bit Nintendo. There is no question in my mind that video games have not only inspired me to be a creative and imaginative individual, but it is certainly the reason I ultimately become an IT professional and a writer (of sorts). I owe a lot to my dad, he had an uncanny ability to see past what I was doing and recognize how it affected me in the long run. He understood that while video games were just that, games, there was a whole world of people behind them and it was his way of tricking me into an interest in computers, programming and reading books, all things that would become a driving force behind the success of my life.

Of all the many types of gaming experiences I have had the pleasure to enjoy which included everything from video/PC games, miniature and board games, RPG’s and more, there is one memory that sticks out above them all. That memory is of me walking into a Bowling Alley for the first time in my life (I was about 12) and discovering the Arcade section.

This was a magical place to me, the sounds, the visual overload, and the sheer selection of games that were often not available anywhere, were now all in one very special place. All you needed was some quarters and you were rewarded with one of the most exciting gaming experiences of a 12 years life.

From that point forward I always had a special fondness for Arcades that would remain with me for the rest of my life. Even today when I see an arcade unit somewhere, I can’t resist dropping a few quarters into the machine to get a moment of that nostalgic feeling of being a kid.

As I grew older I always had a very specific dream and desire. I wanted to have an arcade unit in my house so that I could enjoy that nostalgic feeling of being a kid whenever I wanted. For years I considered buying a unit, perhaps refurbishing one or building one from scratch. There was of course always something in the way. College, marriage, kids… life.

When you turn 45 years old, however, something very interesting and unexpected happens. After a whole life spent being overwhelmed by planning, studying, working, raising kids, etc.. etc suddenly everything slows down. You suddenly have more time and more money, in a way, all your hard work starts to really payout.

I realized recently that, it’s not actually too late to fulfill some of my little mini dreams, that I can actually fit some me-time into life’s equation.

This brings me to this little article. Starting today I will begin work on creating my very own, stand-up arcade unit from scratch. I plan to document this project on this site, filling it with pictures and updates on my progress, and perhaps it may even become a sort of step-by-step process to inspire your own do-it-yourself project.

You will find on the top of this site there is now a new menu link called Project: Arcade. All of the articles I write for this project will appear here in a list and whenever I do any work on the Arcade unit, I will add it here.

I don’t know how many people are going to be interested in this sideshow, but I swore when I created this blog that I would document all of my gaming experience and while building an arcade unit is certainly a bit of a stretch of that definition, I say close enough!

DAY 1: Comming Soon!