Build a Desktop Arcade Machine with Raspberry Pi 3 and Retropie: Super Turbo Pro Edition

Hello, my name is Ronon and today I will show you how to

build

a 1/3 scale

arcade

cabinet. Both players use a Raspberry Pi. I always start my

arcade

build

s by focusing on the monitor, since I build from the inside. and the monitor is the most critical part that needs to be sized and measured so that the case fits and doesn't look stupid as far as proportions and too thick bezel etc. so this is a Dell monitor that I bought on a sale garage was actually in a free pile, most of these Dell monitors or HP monitors, any monitor that was used in the mid 2000s and 2010s is practically garbage now this one has DVI and VGA inputs, the DVI is really the better here for the PI now I have to separate the plastic which is quite a process because each monitor is built differently because we want to get to the raw TFT panel with the metal cage and the power supply attached so remove the button board, this is the plastic that comes with it.

I turned it off and found out that you had to pry it up from the front, not the back, so if you get one of these Dell monitors, there you go and when you've pried it down to here, make sure it's still working fine so always check in between. Now I'm going to measure the bezel, the overall dimensions and the window, as well as the thickness of the monitor, I'm going to remove a few more parts that aren't necessary for this thing, so if you're going into a game room and I'm just going to be here.

Be careful with the button assembly so you don't break it or crush it or cut the ribbon cable again. Test the things you know before you commit to something, make sure your parts work well, so I'll use a tape measure that has millimeters. just be careful if you use a tape measure, that swinging part will give you a plus or minus error, so these are the measurements I got. This TFT panel is 362 by 298 and most 17-inch monitors in this ratio divide the resolutions or By dividing the interior dimensions, I get a ratio of five to four, so if you get a 17-inch monitor with this proportion, it's very likely that its overall dimensions will be similar to this, so I take all these drawings and start drawing an arcade cabinet. the third or fourth one I built this size so I'm just making it look easy but this is what the 3D model looks like, there are some strategic cuts and holes in places that make assembly and access to the game room and the

raspberry

pie are simple and We'll cover them as we build this cabinet, so here are the resource requirements for wood: It's 2/3 of a 4x8 sheet of quarter-inch lumber and a couple of sheets of acrylic, all optional so I cut this on a laser cutter I don't have a laser cutter but I have access to one at a makerspace that is closing so I can't film there anyway so these are the cut pieces and I'm just going to do it. a dry assembly so you can get an idea of ​​how this all goes is pretty self explanatory but it's quite a process filming it and gluing it at the same time so take it like this this is what it looks like when you start holding it.

I don't have many clamps so I had to clamp this in series stages. These are all the series stages I had a clamp on, so this is a pretty big case for such a thin case, so I need to reinforce it structurally. This is a regular board that costs like 2 dollars for 6 feet and I'm just cutting this along the length of the wine, being

super

ior to this thing to give it a skeleton or some bones to reinforce everything. I go crazy with glue over and over again. clamp it in stages because I only have a limited number of clamps and this is how it looks so we are measuring the depth of the monitor and that depth is a little different in all the corners, but it's good to have it for reference and I'm using these brackets that I cut from the same quarter inch of wood, just stacking them up to the thickness of the monitor and you can see we're doing a dry fit right here just to make sure before we continue that everything is going to work.

It fits and fortunately it does. I'm also checking some gaps on the side because I want to add more structural reinforcement so I'm just getting the area where it might have some interference with some side supports and cut more pieces to size and glue them together and this is what it looks like when you glue it together, so at this point let all the glue dry and we can start painting with a cabinet glued down and that glue is cured and dry, it's time to do my least favorite part which is the main part. sand and paint right now i'm using body filler to fill in the gaps and make the toe joints a little more even, so you have to fill everything in, sand this and repeat if necessary, this is after one or two sandings, if it starts. to look flush and feel flush, its good, this is an oil based primer.

I'm just using a bent rod or a coat rack to mix it and when you've made a mess then you know everything is mixed correctly. I am painting. some of the parts is what the first layer looks like. I'm using a found brush to hopefully remove the streaks from the brush if you use a bristle brush and I would normally apply about two coats of primer for my arcade cabinets so the back. and the top look when Prime is applied is a fun process here is a second coat after the first is dry just follow the direction of the pain you are using and the second coat after the next second coat is dry sand everything with 200 to 400 I like to use a random orbital sander like this because it's easier it's actually what I use on all my sanding and it goes into the paint booth which I don't have but I have a membership at a certain place so I used only forced oleum spray paint and I'm going to apply three coats of spray paint on the cabinet so I'm only spraying the accessory parts.

This is what the first coat looks like when applied, it's a big difference once you put this first coat on it starts to look like a playroom so I leave at least two or three days for this to dry if it still smells So, if it makes a small room smell like paint, it's not dry yet, gas it, let it dry. Don't rush this step. Now that we have a finished and painted case, we will first start with a DC buck regulator. Most of our DC supply is out of 12 volts and we need to bring it down to 5 volts.

Raspberry Pi so that's what it is but make sure you use one of these they are usually sold as adjustable and we need to bring it down to about five point one five volts with a 12 12 volt supply plugged in that mounts with the barrier strip to the back of the monitor and we are also going to glue the monitor controls to the back to save them space from the bottom of the case. Then I start with some cardstock and cut my bevel with it. It's kind of the place to live right now because I can put artwork behind it, but most NeoGeo cases just have a solid black or solid red LCD frame, so in keeping with tradition, just go with that, these These are the monitor mounts that I am going to install correctly. now and attach the bottom two capture tabs and I'm just securing this with hardware number eight by 32.

If everything was measured correctly, the monitor should drop down and fit perfectly more, a couple of millimeters and it should have more than a couple of millimeters of tolerance. Move things around next time install our single pole switches, this is so we can control the Raspberry Pi power, amplifier power and rear leg power from the front. These are latching switches, just two of them, one of them I'll use the other. it's a spare, but I'm still going to put it in there and then these momentary buttons will be my volume controls, all accessible from the front.

Attach the cover plate with some nuts and bolts just to clean up the seam between the bottom. the marquee and the top of the monitor and this small pusher piece will force or help push the clear plastic pieces of the marquee into the speaker stand. These are three inch midrange speakers with a two watt amplifier mounted between them, just common parts that you can find electronics like MCM that use less on the right channels and then the LED strip mounts on the same. Now this subset of speakers tells you to place them with two stands just to the left and right and that's secured with hardware number eight.

Raspberry Pi 3 mounts vertically and that's so we can access the USB and SD card ports from the back so we don't have to lift the case to get to it, so the main AC power I'm using only It's the monitor. I cut the cord into two pieces and I'm using a 20 hundred volt switch that's illuminated so when it's on 120 a little light comes on there and a standard power supply receptacle, I take a standard outlet and I plug it in. to a shallow box and then the female end that plugs into the monitor also goes to that outlet in parallel, so the switch controls everything plugged into the outlet and the power goes to the monitor, which simply locks into place. place with a cover plate and with the new work box.

We are simply going to connect the plug receptacle to the switch, connect the ground directly to the plug receptacle and just the power for both poles (hot and neutral) and then that is kept in this box for safety reasons, if it is 120 volts, the connectors are not insulated. so we'll just stick them in a box hoping to keep our fingers from getting wet and then we can check our work and then this subassembly for AC power will mount on the back and then we'll connect the monitor cable to the monitor so that So it's what it looks like now we're going to hook up everything else so I'm going to start by showing you what we just did which is AC now it goes to the monitor and that's what it controls.

Please note that our monitor has 12 volts internally. supply intended for the speakers and we are also going to use an additional 12 volt supply for the PI and the LED backlight and the fan, we use a barrier strip for convenience and the three switches that I already showed you on the amplifier go to one and notice that our barrier strip and buck converter are on the screen and the buck converter goes to the Raspberry Pi, another switch connects to the 12 volt backlight and we have this other switch that I've already shown you that will control our fan and the fan is alone. to remove the heat from the game room, which you can control from the front and use if necessary, and the volume buttons connect to the amplifier and those are the momentary buttons that we also connect to the front, so here's everything and how It would be seen if you are using the monitor that does not have an internal 12 volt supply.

There is another way to do this and this is what it looks like. Note that you need to boost the 12 volt supply to at least 3 amps for this and then you can just connect the speaker amp to your main line so it's not complicated but I recommend using a separate supply for the amp that is isolated of the Raspberry Pi because the drivers generate a lot of noise in the audio when it comes to analog audio. the fan that is optional came from a dead ATX power supply that just mounts to the back panel with some nuts and bolts like that and that extra tab I glued on the bottom this is the artwork I made for the control panel The marquee only has basic shapes that go with the NeoGeo theme and I printed it on a large cannon inkjet plotter.

This is what it looks like and then I'll cut out these graphics and the marquee is sandwiched between two spikes, two pieces of acrylic and I can break them off. bolt it on top and remember that little sliding piece that helps push the center section of the tent flush against the front because at this length it likes the arch. I have mounted two Sanwa jfl joysticks on the control panel and cut. I figured out what I need as far as type of graphics control and now I'm just going to insert the appropriate colored buttons and secure them with nuts, attach the top of the joysticks and we'll take a break and look at the keyboard. encoder so this is a K device it's just a programmable USB HID encoder that works great so it comes in a kit so I have to solder some things.

The other thing about this is that the programmable part is removable from where you terminate all the cables, so if you need to change things on the fly, that's great, make a bunch of cables and put them on these cade hub screw terminals and then we'll just connect the appropriate cables, joysticks and buttons from that termination point, so this is what it looks like when it's all wired up, the keyboard layout or key inputs that I'm going to choose for player 1 and player 2 are something I chose that works well with the name. The best thing about this cade is that it also has a hardware shift button so all your inputs can do double duty.function, because just like the shift key works on your keyboard, so I will have the basic gaming buttons when you are playing and when you hold down the hardware switch. button we get on another set of keys we can perform general menu functions with the RK, so this is just a matter of convenience and works very well, such as exiting the game by inserting a coin without having to remove the buttons dedicated to playing this. is the Kade interface and this is where you program the key customization you want.

This is me, just selecting those keys for the shift command, programs it into your encoder and then once programmed it will reset as a HID device and your computer should recognize it and then you can remove that USB dongle and now plug it into the terminal. screw and connect a USB extension. In this case I'm going to put the control panel on and then that USB extension will connect to the Raspberry Pi and then just add some aluminum standoffs with the back panel facing in and the bottom tab clips onto the bottom of the arcade and then two screws are fixed on the back to hold the game room to itself, so don't forget that when you put the control panel on, we have to wire the hardware switch button which is on the front of the cabinet, this is what does it all Looks like when it's all wired up and now we're going to try a few things, this game room could use a little flair, so that's exactly what I'm going to do.

I'm going to make some graphics for the side and front. There are some archive images. from eBay vinyl cutter I have, it's nothing fancy but it definitely gets the job done if you don't have anywhere else to go for vinyl work, so I just took some images I had in Inkscape, converted them to vectors and just Prints the MVS NeoGeo and some SNK logos. You put transfer tape on the front. You remove the vinyl and then apply it to the painted surface. I'm just going to place where I think I want everything to go. I recommend using it as a square. something to make sure your graphics are level and I'm doing this off camera just because I'm terrible at it and every time I do it on camera I do it crooked so repeat one side to the other and this is what it looks like. with graphics now let's talk about

retropie

retropie

is the best for retro emulation on Raspberry Pi and a discussion will go to the retro PI website download the OS or image for Raspberry Pi you have unzipped the image and then use the win32diskimager loader if you are using Windows to write the image to your SD card once you have written it to the SD card depending on the class.

I recommend a class 10 SD card for this as the speed will make a difference compared to a class 4. Insert the SD card into the finished arcade cabinet, plug everything in and turn on the speakers supplying power and our key backlight and fan power are optional of course it's a little noisy because of how much air the fan pulls from the power supply but it's not a big deal so here's what it looks like when everything is set up and turned on , it looks like an arcade

machine

. I'm just proving that it works, if you didn't believe me, so let's look at a two-player game and one whose name you remember.

Shift key that Kade can handle, so now we simply press the tab button using Shift and enter the main settings to configure all the player controls for player 1 and player 2. This is a convenient feature of this keyboard emulator so you can have a dedicated keyboard. arcade controls and then they all work as function keys or whatever you want them to be on your keyboard. You can see here that all the keys work as intended. So how do we move files to SD card? The easiest way is to install pixel, what we are going to do, can be built in retropie scripts, it takes a little time, but once you have installed it, you can exit the emulation station by pressing f4, type sudo start will load the pixel

desktop

. environment and that way you can now browse using a GUI file system, drag and drop files from your flash drive which you can connect via USB and you can also easily edit any settings for retropie and emulation station and it's really nice to have a terminal-less environment to do this, so we're looking at the main retroarch configuration file where you can edit the video actions of the controls etc, and then you can create specific configuration files for each emulator, so that these take priority over the general settings and This is where they are located.

Your other option is to simply SSH over the network or Wi-Fi and to do this we will use the built-in installation script or the retropie menu to enable Wi-Fi if you are using a PI 3. and then enter your credentials for that Wi-Fi. Fi, now you need to go to Raspberry Pi configuration interface options and enable SSH now on your computer, we will use winscp if you log in to PI. I have not changed the credentials and once you log in successfully your PI should be on and connected to your network, you can simply drag and drop files to the PI, this is quite quick and depends on the resources your router can handle and may also delete files from here.

This is also very convenient once you have moved those files, just restart the emulation station and then they will appear. Your final option is to use Retro PI's built-in file manager. This is a little cumbersome, but at least there's something there. retro fide since like version 3.8 this has been an embedded system, it's just a standard Linux GUI where you can look at a source like the USB flash drive and then use the function keys to copy and delete commands and you'll notice that the reason I made some function keys available in my layout this way, if I just want to quickly delete something in the game room I can do that, so there are a lot of details about retropie.

I'm not going to answer anything other than what I'm covered. and if you have questions don't ask them in these youtube comics go to the retro PI website look at their forms and read them all the answers are there do yourself a favor and take the initiative to solve your own questions before asking here because the retropie The resource is such a good place to get answers that sums up this entire tutorial. I hope it was informative at least in some way, whether it's designing your arcade, putting it together, painting it, how to do graphics or how to wire the thing or even getting familiar with the Raspberry Pi, I try to cover everything so you have an idea that not It's complicated when you break it down into each individual step.

I get asked a lot of questions how do I get started, what do I do for this and this. and my best advice is if this is something you want to build, you want to build your own game room, don't wait to learn, just start, all you need is like a jigsaw and some simple tools, and as soon as you start . The faster you will hone your skills and eventually get to the point where you satisfy the most important critic, which is you, if you are satisfied with what you built, then what else would it matter?

So I encourage you to start and take a Take advantage of this and look for resources on the Internet because they are all there, so thank you for watching and take care everyone. I know I look like that guy from Vsauce, but consider this, maybe he looks like me.