Planet Arduino

Arcade machines are a dying breed and that’s a shame, because their purpose-built approach to gaming is so wholesome. There is something intrinsically satisfying about a device that does one thing and does it well. If you want to bring that beauty into your own home, Migi has a great Instructables tutorial that will walk you through building your own arcade cabinet with custom Arduino-based controls.

Migi’s cabinet design is inspired by Capcom’s Mini Cute line, which was a series of small arcade machines popular in Japanese cafes. But while it is smaller than standard arcade cabinets, it is still big enough to feel substantial. An old laptop runs MAME or whatever other emulation software the user desires. Because a CRT (cathode-ray tube) display is a must for an arcade cabinet, Migi used a 14” Sony PVM (Professional Video Monitor). Those tend to be pretty pricey these days, so anyone replicating this build may want to entertain other CRT options.

Arcade games need rock-solid controls, so Migi designed this to utilize Sanwa buttons and sticks. The cabinet has controls for two players, with an Arduino UNO Rev3 dedicated to each set of controls. Migi set it up that way to make the software setup easier, as each Arduino will appear as its own gamepad in the emulation software. 

Migi constructed the cabinet itself using a combination of MDF and acrylic. A big laser cutter made that fabrication a snap, but less well-equipped hobbyists may have to utilize alternative tools like handheld routers. With a coat of paint and some printed graphics, it looks fantastic. And the Sanwa controls should hold up to decades of heavy use. 

The post Build an adorable arcade cabinet with custom controls appeared first on Arduino Blog.

This arcade machine helps creator Alex Weber relive arcade memories, but is slightly easier to move than a full-sized “cab!”

Galaga is one of Weber’s–and many others’–top five arcade games. Easy to learn, but difficult to master, it was just asking to accept your money and time! Now though, using a Raspberry Pi and MAME software, you can have this and other old-school games at your disposal. Weber built a cabinet for this purpose around an old CRT television slightly smaller than original size.

In order to keep from having to fool with the TV every time it switched on, he made an automated remote control with an Arduino and IR LED that sends signals to turn it on and switches the TV to AV mode.

I have a soft spot for 8-bit arcades… I saw these for the first time. At least it felt like that. All machines where running. All coin doors were open! Somebody saw me standing in front of them with huge eyes and showed me how to trigger the switch to get credits for free. BAM! I was hooked.

You can see the full build on Weber’s tinkerlog site as well as Hackaday’s writeup here.

[Ed] was tasked with adding push-button degaussing to an arcade cabinet’s CRT console. The display can be rotated to portrait mode for games that require it, but each time this is done, the magnetic fields get out of whack.

Fortunately, the schematics arrived with the display. [Ed] found that the degauss coil is connected in series with a PTC fuse in an odd arrangement that he didn’t agree with. He decided to use an SSR to switch the coil, and after making lots of transistor-based designs on paper, grabbed a nearby Arduino.

[Ed] took off the PTC and soldered in two wires to its pads for the SSR. He added a wire to the power supply decoupling cap to power the new deguassing circuit and connected the SSR to the Arduino as an open collector input. There was just enough space available to mount the relay to the frame’s base and the Arduino on the side. [Ed] wrote a short method to trigger the SSR and reconnected the PTC fuse. Now it degausses at power up as well as on demand.