(figured I’d ‘do my part’ and make my first Lemmy post…!)
I love this thing too much to part with, but I’m gonna have to be honest: I barely use it. More often or not I retro-game on my Steam Deck…slightly more portable!
Has anyone else built their own units for retro-gaming though?
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Well, personally I turned a NES cartridge into a RetroPi console
That sounds really cool. Do you have any pictures?
Yes, I will upload a photo of the project soon on this community :)
About 13 years ago, I made this fella.
https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg
It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.
It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.
That’s a sick cabinet
Sure, I built a retro arcade cabinet from a raspberry pi, crt tv and arcade parts. It’s fun af.
where did you source your arcade parts?
I’m definitely thinking about it. I played around with the idea a while back, but remember getting frustrated with the key mapping.
We’ve got a full-size arcade cabinet in our kitchen. Was a DIY passion project of my husband’s before we met, and it was fun for a while because the various niblings would play with it when they came round for the big family breakfasts we used to do. Sometimes if I was alone in the house I’d leave it on demo mode just to have some comforting background noise.
Niblings grew up, I got used to the quiet of a small town, and I don’t think it’s even been turned on in about five years because we’ve also got way more portable options 😅
It’s my little one that gets the most use out of mine too, that’s for sure.
As @[email protected] said elsewhere I think I enjoyed building it more than actually sitting down to replay something specific. It doesn’t help that I have a million other little projects (game programming, music production, model painting, sim-racing…!) that become more interesting as I make progress on another…
Still, I’m glad my darling daughter and her friends get use out of the machine!
I picked up a little bartop cabinet from a local arcade convention a few years back for a few hundred bucks. Ended up ripping out the Pandora’s Box (overseas piracy device with a bunch of dumped ROMs) and threw a Raspberry Pi into it. Got everything wired up with RetroPi… then realized I needed to add more buttons.
It’s been in that state for years lol
I’ve always wanted to but it seems dauntingly expensive and tricky to do. Any tips?
Things are certainly pricier these days, that’s for sure. Depending on what country you’re in you might be able to find a decent arcade supplier for the sticks/buttons – and even the cabinet itself (I used Arcade World UK.
For the actual system itself there’s plenty of options these days, and a Raspberry Pi is more than capable to power most emulators. For the wiring of sticks/buttons, YouTube has a good chunk of resources.
Given cost, it might to wise to start with the RPi set-up, and if you’re happy with how that works, look into getting the arcade ‘shell’ for it :)
Making a top-level reply as I seemingly cannot reply directly to anyone who posts from kbin.social? Is this a federation issue – or have I somehow set something up wrong?
I annoyingly couldn’t see your image until I viewed your comment on kbin itself. Anyway, you say ‘simple’, but you may have put more effort in than me ;)
There are quite a few nice RPi projects, that’s for sure…! Other than a RPi4 mini NAS-like server, I’ve got a couple of RPi Zeroes around the house for a house-wide music system.
If you find your RPi again and you wanted to make it a retro machine, as others here have mentioned you certainly don’t have to go the whole hog; you could just install a pre-sorted distro (like RetroPie), hook it up to a TV, and use USB controllers.
Same, I’m on Lemmy.world and the image in their post image doesn’t show up. That’s annoying!
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I built a small Batocera machine a couple months ago using an Odroid N2+ board. Pretty simple to get up and running and plays anything oldschool I could ever want. I get the urge to play it pretty regularly too, so I’m happy it’s ready to go when I am!
It’s on my to-do list, but the arcade hardware itself can get quite pricy. I may end up just using USB controllers instead of the buttons, sticks, and trackballs.
I received a raspberry pi as a gift a few years ago. I had so many plans. Currently I don’t know where it is, but I know it’s full of dust.
I’d like to, but space, cost, and amount of time I’d actually spend using it make it impractical.
Nothing fancy but I built and painted this one for my son for ~$100. Used one of those Namco arcade controllers, a cheap lcd from Craig’s list, some wood and paint… simple but it turned out pretty awesome 🤘
Oh my god, using one of the little plug’n’play Namco boxes is GENIUS.
