Repurposing an old iMac as a bar-top arcade console... advice?

j.e.f.f

I have a mid-2010 27" iMac that has been sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing lately... It's not quite fast enough anymore to be my primary machine for graphic design and photography, but it should be plenty powerful enough to do anything the Raspberry Pi can do, so I thought it would be nice to turn it into a bar-top arcade machine.

I'm hoping someone has experience with this... do you think it's a good idea to install Debian or Ubuntu linux on it and install Retropie manually or should I stick with Mac OS and run something else like Attract Mode and configure the emulators manually?

I'd like to have a decent collection of N64 games on it... can I expect performance to be pretty good? It was maxed to the gills when I first bought it... quad-core i7 2.93 GHz, 32 GB of RAM, ATI Radeon 5750 graphics w/ 1GB vram. What is the most recent system it is likely to emulate well?

I don't want a point-and-click mouse and keyboard interface, so the underlying OS is only important insofar as it will support what I'm after. But I'd like it to have a kiosk-like interface, navigable with just a game controller -- like RetroPie -- and maybe even with a touch interface using an IR frame.

Any suggestions, advice, opinions are welcome.

Thanks!

Jeff

mitu

Try using OpenEmu to see how well it performs w.r.t. to emulation. It has support for gamepads/joysticks and you can test various emulators. As for a frontend - I think Pegasus supports macOS.

Parabolaralus

I did this with a 2011 iMac (as a test) and it worked quite well. You should be able to emulate dolphin on this machine too, but i wouldnt expect anything beyond that.

One thing youll want to do is make sure you start your Ubuntu or Debian install through bootcamp assistant in OSX. This will create a hybrid GPT/MBR partition where it will boot correctly and you can install your OS in emulated BIOS. I think you have to burn it to a DVD too, but its been a few years and im not 100% on that, or if thats changed. External DVD drives do NOT work for this so hopefully your drive is fine...Mine was not and i had to source a replacement to proceed.

If you boot from a flash drive it will try to install in EFI which sounds fine and dandy, but your video card will not work properly with that model no matter what you do...Youll get stuck with software rendering and the first thing you'll notice is that you cannot adjust brightness which is cranked to the max by default.
The issue is that older macs had a 32 bit UEFI chip which any modern OS that supports that requires it to be 64 bit else things dont work right. You cant even boot windows in EFI on that computer, but linux in general seems to partially work. I think they updated Macs in 2012-2013 so now it works as if it was a normal PC and you dont have to use bootcamp assistant for this.

j.e.f.f

@Parabolaralus So you would recommend installing Linux instead of staying native Mac OS, and going with something like OpenEMU or HyperPie?

Parabolaralus

@j-e-f-f

I do actually. You're looking to turn it into a cabinet of some sort right? After i read your post i started to think this actually is brilliant!

My experience with OpenEMU is that it requires a mouse or at least it did at the time which doesnt make sense for the project. I cannot comment on HyperPie though as this is the first time ive even heard of it.

Install Ubuntu or any Debian based distro via bootcamp which should get you the results youre looking for.
Since youre starting this process from OSX i would actually suggest partitioning the drive leaving as little space for OSX as possible, but leave the OS there in case you need to make a change later. Brightness settings, startup chime/audio settings are NOT persistent when adjusted through your bootcamp OS which would be linux in this case so if you wanted to have it startup as quite as possible or as bright as possible you need to be able to boot into OSX, but also when you set it to boot into linux direct OSX would practically be invisible to anyone using the device even on startup. You have to hold the option/alt key to get into OSX and im assuming a keyboard would not be plugged in or available once completed so nobody would accidentally be booting into OSX.

j.e.f.f

@Parabolaralus Not planning to build this into a cabinet, but I plan to wrap it in some sort of decal set to make it look like a dedicated arcade machine.

From what I've read, HyperPie was born out of RetroPie enthusiasts, but from what I can see, it doesn't appear that the community is anywhere near as active as this one. I've also read that it is possible to compile Emulationstation for Mac OS, so I might give that a try first before obliterating the OS altogether.

Still in the planning phase at the moment anyway, as I need to keep High Sierra around just a little longer. Will post back with an update once I start the project

Parabolaralus

@j-e-f-f

I'm actually strongly advising you not to kill OSX, but to install alongside. There's a long list of reasons for this none of them have to do with using OSX regularly some of which I've already mentioned.

Imagine that if someone picks up a keyboard and does a command+option+p+r on that or the cr2032 battery dies...you will not be able to boot into Linux, you'll instead be greeted with a folder icon that has a question mark in it! You now need to scramble to boot OSX somehow which target mode works if you have another mac around with FireWire B, but you might not have one.

Now that I've said that it sounds kind of flaky lol, but all in all in terms of form factor, screen protection, price (age) and readily available parts it would be great for a cabinet...I know you're not building one just skinning one but you gave me a hell of an idea! Weight reduction would probably be my biggest hurdle, but even then nothing my cutting wheel couldn't tackle.

Last thought you could try an x86 install on the Mac using a virtual machine and a free program called virtualbox. I regularly do my testing using VMs both for work and play...

mitu

@j-e-f-f said in Repurposing an old iMac as a bar-top arcade console... advice?:

I've also read that it is possible to compile Emulationstation for Mac OS, so I might give that a try first before obliterating the OS altogether.

The RetroPie fork of Emulationstation won't compile out-of-the-box on macOS. There are a few patches floating around that straight out disable the sound settings in order to make it compile (and that's using gcc, not the Xcode provided clang), but honestly I'd give OpenEmu a shot or Pegasus (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/9598/).

j.e.f.f

@Parabolaralus Is there a minimum Mac OS I should be using for dual boot then? I'm assuming I'd need at least Lion (10.7), as it appears to be the earliest version you can use the recovery mode with, and only requires 8GB of space.

any reason why I should be thinking about using a more recent version instead?

My plan is to reformat the iMac with a fresh install of whatever minimum version of Mac OS I need, then initiate the boot camp install afterwards.

It's currently running High Sierra which would be overkill I think for my needs, and would just waste disk space.

Parabolaralus

@j-e-f-f

That sounds like a pretty good plan. If you do a clean install from the recovery partition youll either get Lion or Snow Leopard in which either one would be sufficient as well as small.
If it currently has High Sierra installed you would have likely gotten an EFI update which allows for internet recovery and it may force you into high sierra as well, but it really doesn't matter which you use aside from space. You can also disconnect the ethernet cord and it -should- boot from the recovery partition instead giving you an older version of OSX.