Simple Cocktail Table Arcade Build

[Justin]

Here's a pretty cool DIY cocktail table arcade build. This doesn't seem all that complicated, if you have a decent workspace and a few of the right tools I think any of us would be capable of using the stencils and completing this build. Pretty cool!

 

 

[DegasElite]

That would be really cool to build. Thanks for posting, Justin. :O)

[RickR]

I'm going to save this for a future watch. 

I've gone down this path before, and building out the cabinet and controls is do-able.  It always comes down to configuring retro-pi or whatever platform you choose to run.  It just seems so finicky.  You can get the main menu and a few favorites to work just fine, but then as you start expanding to other arcade games or other systems, the controls get all hosed. 

I've seen people get very excited to buy pre-build retro-pi builds and they are happy because everything works out of the box.  But then shortly after, something gets hosed and they send out a "help" message.  The response is always "I hope you backed up the SD card as it came".  WTH.  Too fragile.   Or they can't get a certain game to run.  "Oh, you need 0.35b of the rom, not 0.42". 

But no worries, I'm going to keep trying and keep researching until I find something that works and stays working.

Thank you for posting.

 

[TrekMD]

That is really cool. 

[Atari 5200 Guy]

I have an old Dell desktop with a P4 and running XP I was wanting to do something like this with.  I was going to use MaLa front end but I can't find it anywhere.  I really liked how you could manipulate every aspect of it and make a front end that was your own.  I might just hang on to it after all.

 

[RickR]

9 minutes ago, Atari 5200 Guy said:

I have an old Dell desktop with a P4 and running XP I was wanting to do something like this with.  I was going to use MaLa front end but I can't find it anywhere.  I really liked how you could manipulate every aspect of it and make a front end that was your own.  I might just hang on to it after all.

 

I have a friend who may be ditching a Dell "centrino" laptop that I hope he gives to me so I can try this same thing.  I saw an article that MaximumRD linked a while ago about a version of RetroPi that works on normal computers (not just Raspberry Pi). 

It's a good idea because I imagine it has plenty of power for most emulation, and if you wanted, you could build a cabinet around the laptop (add a screen, add the controller as USB, etc.