Full Size Arcade Build - DC Vs Marvel

vaportrail

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!