Full Size Arcade Build - DC Vs Marvel

HurricaneFan

@vaportrail Got a few questions for you regarding this build:

Does the amp sit behind the tv in the top part of the cabinet? If you need to adjust volume at all, is it easy to get to?
What does this use for joystick/buttons to connect to the pi? Controlblock, ipac, etc...
With your 200 gig card, did you use the default retropie 4.4 build or a custom build from the game room site?
What buttons/joysticks did you pick for this build?

vaportrail

@hurricanefan

This thing has so much room inside the cabinet, that's the first place I thought about putting it. Then I remembered how frustrating it is with my bartop to have to reach around the back, open up the door, and fiddle around finding the volume knob. So this time I mounted it under the control panel. It flips up and....boom....instant access to the amp.
It is using the Xin-mo: xm-02 controller encoder to handle the transfer of input from the buttons to the Pi.
It's running Retropie version 4.3.11 with a Hyperpie front end image. The image was provided by GRS.
Thanks to some suggestions from a few fellers on here, I went with the Sanwa Joysticks. They do feel like step up from the LED ones that I went with on the Bartop. I have very limited time on them but so far they feel tighter and take input with less throw than the LED ones. I am a sucker for shiny objects and bright lights, so I went with the LED chrome trim buttons also from GRS.

HurricaneFan

@vaportrail Thanks for the quick response. Wow, I didn't know the panel flips up. Thats awesome!

vaportrail

@hurricanefan

Oh yeah....the back has two panels that swing open also.

HurricaneFan

@vaportrail That's a pretty slick design on their part. I'm itching to pull the trigger on making a full arcade cabinet but am still gathering the details on what I want in terms of buttons and joysticks.

How wide is the arcade cabinet?

Are you happy with the quality of the TV model you purchased?

vaportrail

@hurricanefan

Yeah, there are definitely a lot of things to factor in. The cool thing in making it yourself is being able to incorporate all the ideas you like from other's designs.

The overall width of the cabinet itself is 31.5". The control panel has some angles to it and at it's widest is 34.75".

So far I'm happy with the t.v. It's only 720p but I didn't see the need to spend more for better resolution for a retro game machine. The only down side with it is I had some compatibility issues with the HDMI output of the Pi with the t.v. It took me about a day to figure out, but long story short, when powered up together with the main power switch on the back of the cabinet, the Pi powered up quicker than the t.v. This causes the Pi to not sense the t.v. and therefore it wouldn't send an HDMI output. All I would get was "no signal" on the t.v. After trouble shooting, and some google searching, I found lots of others having similar issues with other t.v.'s So it isn't just this t.v., it's just how fast whichever t.v. you purchase powers up. The fix was "simple" in the end, just had to edit a couple of lines in the Pi's config text file so that the Pi always outputs an HDMI signal even if it doesn't sense a t.v. Unfortunately I'm not a programmer, so the road to get to the end was a bit long, but it works great now.

mediamogul

@vaportrail

Any particular reason for picking Kyle over Hal? Also, even after all these years, I'm still sore about Lobo having to job to Wolverine. If it weren't for the results being decided by a reader poll, the victory surely would have gone to the main man. I still crack up over the way Aquaman beat Namor though.

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HurricaneFan

@vaportrail Thanks for answering all of my random questions. I'm looking forward to seeing your build video and what it looks like powered up.

vaportrail

@mediamogul

I wish I had some logic to the characters I picked, but honestly it was about finding high resolution files that looked liked they all fit together. It's easy to find all the characters, but some look realistic, some look like computer animations, and some look like comic book characters. So it was hard trying to find that many characters that were high enough resolution to blow up that big, and that looked like they belong together, if that makes sense. I really wanted to include Aquaman on the cabinet, but the only pic I could find was low resolution and looked like it was drawn by a 3rd grader :) As soon as I saw this Green Lantern, I knew I had to have it on the side. I don't know why but I just really dig that image.

vaportrail

@hurricanefan

You got it man!

mediamogul

@vaportrail

They're good choices. You seem to appreciate both comic labels equally and that's rare nowadays. Nice job all around.

Clyde

@vaportrail The drawings do fit together nicely! As for the characters, someone will always complain about them; you can't put three comic nerds in a room without them having five opinions about a single topic. ;) (No offense to comic nerds, I'm a big one myself.)

Care to share the exact fix for your problem? Especially since you learned that it's very common …

vaportrail

@mediamogul said in Full Size Arcade Build - DC Vs Marvel:

@vaportrail

They're good choices. You seem to appreciate both comic labels equally and that's rare nowadays. Nice job all around.

Thanks mediamogul!

@clyde said in Full Size Arcade Build - DC Vs Marvel:

Care to share the exact fix for your problem? Especially since you learned that it's very common …

Absolutely...give me a few days. I used a couple different sources online, and I think I could make a great explanation of what worked for me with a video. I think it would make a good tutorial if others encounter the same issue.

vaportrail

Ok guys.....got the arcade almost 100% done....enough to upload the video to YouTube...so here you go!

HurricaneFan

@vaportrail Looks stunning! Was it easy to hook up the coin door to the pi? What does a vertical arcade game like 1942 look like on a screen that wide?

vaportrail

@hurricanefan

The coin door was remarkably easy, there are no lights on this one, so it's just two wires to the switch on each mechanism (1 signal, 1 ground). I already have coin/select buttons on the control panel, so I just ran them up under the control panel and tied them into the respective player 1/player 2 coin buttons. I am thinking about wiring in a switch between the coin buttons (on the control panel) and coin door so that if I wanted to operate it only with quarters, I could. The only draw back is that those buttons also serve as the select button on console games, so I would have to figure out a work around for that.

Here's a shot of 1942 (Arcade). It doesn't bother me at all, but I understand others can't get past the black bars on the sides. For me, once I'm playing a game, I don't even see what's going on outside the play screen. In a perfect world I would have an arcade for each screen. :)

HurricaneFan

@vaportrail Yeah, I'm like you in that I get in the zone while playing the game and don't notice little details like the black bars. Thanks for taking a quick pic of what a vertical game looks like.

Your build looks amazing, I really want to build an arcade machine now. I've been itching for a new project, but trying to find a place to put the machine once its built is my only problem. Space is tight in my current apartment.

Was there anything you'd do different now that you have it built and setup the way you want?

vaportrail

@hurricanefan

So the only things I plan on adding are a trackball, some low profile casters for the back, and some levelers for the front. I didn't know exactly what casters I wanted before starting the build, or else I would have cut them in before I built it. It's not that big a deal to do it after the fact, but I'm worried about getting a bunch of saw dust between the plexi and the monitor which will be a royal pain to clean. Other than that, I just picked up an 8 bitdo bluetooth controller to supplement playing on some of the console systems. I haven't had time to play or sync it with the arcade yet. So far, that's about it. Maybe I'll come back with some updates once I've played with it for awhile. It seems there are always some things you would do differently once you own things for a while!