Project help needed

Luxous

Hi everyone,

I've decided to build (or attempt to build) a large dining table for my garage conversion.

The table will be 2400 x 1200 and have 6 individual gaming stations ( 1 at either end and 2 on each side)

I understand that I will need 6 individual screens, and raspberry pi units for each 'console'

my question is...

are there complete units I can buy, including joysticks etc for each station?

and can each station run multiple games easily enough?

I own a company called Luxous, we're a commercial upjolstery/ make studio so we have
all equipment I could need such as CNC routers, laser cutters, vinyl & UV printers etc

any help much appreciated

cheers

Allan

cafarellidigital

@Luxous I'm not sure of any kits that include joysticks (though I'm certainly not the authority on that), but there is a company called Canakit that might interest you. They have a few kits available for different purposesthat might work for you.

Though, because of how custom it seems you want, this may not be much help.

This kit has an RPi 3, 32GB Micro SD Card, 2.5A Power Supply, RPi Case, HDMI Cable, 2 Heat Sinks, and a USB Card Reader

But I don't know how much of that you really need in your project. Is a case necessary, or are you mountingthe board some other way? Do you need an HDMI cable? Is a 32GB card overkill for you? Does that Power Supply work for you, or are you going to use some other power cable/setup?

If you want, search for Canakit on Amazon and see if anything interests you.

As far as joysticks are concerned, you'll be better off finding those individually and not in a kit, more likely to find higher quality that way.

Regarding your question about running multiple games, if you mean simultaneously, then not really (also why would you want to?). If you just mean the ability to play from a variety of games, then absolutely! My last build had about 250 games to choose from.

Luxous

@cafarellidigital

thanks for reply, effectively ill have 6 stations on one table so I guess ill need 6 kits with everything included,

with regards to the board, ill laser cut some panels that I can mount the boards on to

initially I thought I could do say one type of games console per station, i.e snes, sega etc, with say 6-10 games per station

I don't even know if this is possible

cafarellidigital

@Luxous with RetroPie, you can have access to many different systems with many games on each. You certainly could break up each station to be a specific console (Station 1 is NES, Station 2 is SNES, etc). In fact it would look really cool if each station was styled/designed for it's respective console; you could even use original or look-a-like controllers appropriate for each station (Station 1 has NES controllers, Station 2 has SNES controllers, etc).

However, the default way RetroPie functions is that a single setup can have access to and play any console (from Atari2600 to PlayStation 1, and plenty of others).

caver01

@Luxous You will need to consider the controller interface at some point. You mentioned joysticks for each station. I take that to mean arcade style controls. If true, you probably also need arcade pushbuttons. Depending on your needs, joysticks and pushbuttons can be easily purchased from a variety of places. But what do you connect them to? I might suggest looking at Adafruit's RetroGame software that allows you to use GPIO pins for input. The software converts the inputs to keyboard keypresses. The beauty of this solution is that with just a single joystick per Pi (following my assumptions above), you don't need additional controller hardware, and you could simply wire everything directly to the Pi x6.