With the control panel layout finalized, I test fit everything together. I wish I took more pictures along this stage, but unfortunately I did not. Next project I will have to snap more photos. I was originally intending a flashing Tardis light up on top, then just went and cut a ventilation hole up there instead, totally forgetting about the light fixture. Ah well. I still wired up my Raspberry Pi with a script to drive two LED lights embedded in the speaker holes to pulsate with the Tardis ‘Whoosh!’ sound when the machine boots up, so it all worked out well enough.

I designed and printed off the Marquee at home, overlaying the Doctor’s name in Gallifrey on top of the ‘Pop’s Arcade’ in a Doctor Who style font. Behind the marquee is just a flat panel of wood with 2 soft white 12 volt LED strips from my old RC airplane days. I printed two copies of the marquee and laid them over each other, which not only fought off light washing out the print but also gave a slight effect of depth to the words which I really liked.

Unfortunately I only have a inkjet and not a huge plotter, therefore at certain angles you can see where joined the two marquee halves together. There are printing companies online that will do full pieces, and I’ll heavily consider it next time around.

The Control Panel piece is hinged so it lefts up and towards you to get access to any wiring necessary, and the original plans I found (see first post) were adjusted to add more height for a keyboard tray. The very back of the arcade opens up to reveal the monitor mounted on a horizontal length of wood, with the power supply, wiring, and raspberry pi secured inside.

Now that it’s put together, tear it all down

I assembled most of it at this point except for the raspberry Pi and controls. This way I knew the wood came together as it should before I took it into the garage for painting. I haven’t done a lot of routing in my life either, so I was opting for white edge banding compared to arcade T-Molding. While the T-Molding really looks great and smooths edges out nicely, I figured I’d save that wood working struggle for a later time.

So, taking each piece downstairs, it was time to sand and prime.
Not having access to anything near a professional painting setup, just a garage with some Krylon Fusion and some sand paper, I got down to business. I was surprised and happy overall with how it turned out, and while I read that I could have just started painting, I’m really glad on how the primer helped the paint attach and how smooth 95% of the surfaces felt when I was done.

It was around this time between painting breaks that I worked on the acrylic control panel overlay. Measuring out the acrylic to match the control panel was easy. The cutting of the holes for the acrylic proved to be more of a challenge. I didn’t want to just use a spade or forstner bit. I tried to practice with scrap acrylic knowing it would be a struggle and it surely was. So when it came down to the actual cutting of the holes for the buttons and joystick to fit into, I opted for a step bit on the acrylic whereas I used the forstner bit on the control panel wood.

A Milwaukee #9 7/8 in. and 1-1/8 in. Step Drill Bit, to be exact. Taking it slow into the circles and spots I drew on the acrylic outer plastic wrap (leave that on while you drill!), I couldn’t have asked for an easier cutting experience with acrylic. Once the piloting hole was drilled through, this thing literally fell through the acrylic like butter, step by step. Take it slow, take it easy, and with the 1 1/8″ maximum width of the bit matching my desired hole size, I didn’t have to worry about it sliding further and making a larger hole than intended. After I finished drilling all of the holes in the acrylic, I noticed only one small crack that was hidden by the button chrome anyhow. After drilling that many holes I was more than accepting of that outcome. Expensive as it may be, it’s my go-to for acrylic hole drilling from this point forward.

I found some Tardis schematics online and printed them out on a high gloss inkjet paper. Trimming those the control panel board, I was able to complete the acrylic/overlay/control panel sandwich. I manually traced the circles through with the paper and cut them out by hand, however. Drills and paper are extremely strange bedfellows, in my opinion.

After the paint dries…

It’s time to take it all back upstairs and put it all together.

While C slept one morning, I was edge banding my life away after finally getting the painted pieces re-assembled. While I’m glad I used a hot iron to affix the edge banding, it sure is a delicate process. Compared to T-Molding, however, I think it came out fairly well with only a few spots to touch up or re-cut afterward.

So at this point, it was really ready to go except for one last piece. The side art. An arcade machine should have something on the side, and I’ve got a ncie control panel, cool lit up Marquee, but nothing yet for the side art. I struggled with the idea of printing a large background on paper and having to line up each piece… Or something on adhesive ink jet vinyl… or a poster of some sort.

C had a great idea that left a lot of the nice ‘Tardis Blue’ paint I found revealed but also gave her a creative outlet with that Silhouette cutter. She searched around for various members of the Dr. Who rogue’s gallery and started cutting outlines on adhesive backed vinyl. Here’s the spectacular result:

Even the piece above the keyboard tray got some K-9 action:

When it’s all said and done…

I love how it turned out. I love that it was challenging for me on numerous levels, from hardware, woodworking, painting, graphics, software, joystick controls, lighting, and even some electrical work, as a LED switch plug and cutting apart a surge protector was not something I’d ever thought I’d be doing. I love that I was going to be able to present this as a gift to my Dad, and we could relive gaming on three separate platforms all over again, from Atari 2600 to Commodore 64 to your standard IBM PC.

It may not be the perfect build, but it’s the all the effort that goes into a handmade gift that really makes it special. As much as this was for Dad, I give credit to Mom for holding a secret for so many months.

When we took it over to my parent’s house, it was underneath a sheet and sitting on the coffee room table. He had only one guess that he could come up with what was sitting underneath the cloth: a gun rack. His expression when I lifted up the sheet, however, was priceless. The first thing he asked after looking at it from various angles was ‘What is it?’ ‘Well, Pop, it’s your very own arcade machine.’ ‘Well yeah, but… it works?’

I powered it up into it’s start up sequence – a Tardis flying through space and the words ‘Welcome To Pop’s Arcade’ flying right along with it, Dr. Who theme music and all. He was completely enamored and taken aback by the whole thing. When you hear the words ‘I don’t think you’ll ever be able to top this gift and what it means to me that you made this’, I felt overjoyed that we could relive a little of our gaming history together again and that he loved how it turned out.

In fact, that’s what we did for the next two or three hours. Playing Heretic on my laptop connected to his Tardis Arcade via LAN meant that once again, after 20 years, I could turn him into a chicken with the ‘Morph Ovum’ spell, and he could, somehow, manage to figure out a way to peck me to death.

Visit the Tardis Gallery for all images.

The post The Tardis Themed Arcade Comes Together appeared first on Krystof.IO.

So I started browsing around for DIY arcade designs, as I wanted to make this myself, and hopefully not lose a limb in the process. The two people I would have asked for help, Salazar and Pops, I could not ask… As I was also building a retro PC for Salazar as well. So any woodworking would be my first and mine alone. Still have all my fingers, so I must have done something right.

Ordering a game at the bar…top

There are numerous designs for your own DIY arcade. Cocktail, Bartop, Standup, Showcase… Bartop ended up winning for my gift for Pops – I could put it on his bar downstairs (if I could convince him to stop using it as a storage area, but if Mom can’t do that, I doubt I’d be able to) or even a desk. I searched numerous designs, but found this instructable by rolfebox that fit my bill for the most part:

The plans are great, and I followed them not to the letter, but more to the word. I knew I was using at least these components:

• Raspberry Pi Internals
• Acer VS228 LCD Monitor
• Joysticks and Buttons
• Keyboard and Mouse accessible (we played a LOT of Heretic, Hexen, and Doom)
• LED Lights for Marquee
• LED lights for startup sequence (I wanted to add the Tardis Whoosh!)

I wanted to make sure all of these would physically fit with the plans above. They wouldn’t right off the bat, you could see above there is no keyboard tray, and the monitor used is smaller than the one I wanted. There are two main conclusions to draw from this:

• Be ready to modify any plans you find for your own purposes. Print them off, tape them together, or take them to your local printer and print them at scale. Your hardware needs to fit, and if you don’t have exactly every single piece used in an example you find, you may need to adapt measurements.
• Make a cardboard mock-up of your final plans before you cut any wood. I can’t stress that enough, so I’ll probably say it again in either this sentence or the Make a cardboard mock-up of your final plans before you cut any wood. — well, there it is. You can measure the width and height of your display and make sure the cardboard mock-up fits, as you can see in the featured photo at the top and below:

No Guts, No Glory

So now that I have the plans I wanted to base the arcade build upon, had a separate thread in my head of what was going to be inside. While I’m used to keyboard and mouse gaming on a PC, a DIY Arcade’s spirit demands joystick and button glory.

This was a difficult decision. You can make this as cheap or expensive as possible. You could buy your own joystick, your own buttons, your own controller, and wire each one yourself. I’ve been down that road, and was getting tired of the soldering iron. While it would have helped my soldering skills, there was a balance between exactly how much Y I wanted to put in the DIY. I was already building the cabinet, I figured I’d at least purchase some wiring harnesses instead of cutting, crimping, and soldering each connection individually.

So, a pack of hardware suited me best. I opted for this package from Game Room Solutions

You get essentially everything you need to use arcade hardware in your RetroPie arcade setup. It’s also, due to the USB controller shown, not limited to the your Raspberry Pi.

A shell of an arcade

Off I go to Home Depot. Tools, Lumber, Glue, Brackets. I’ve measured out the cardboard prototype and just had to figure out the material I’d use to create this monstrosity. I searched for a few options available to me, and they came down to two in the end:

• Plywood – This is what I ended up going with. 3/4″ thick Maple or Birch Plywood. It may be heavier, and I could have probably gone lighter, but I wanted stability and some room for error. I could still sand and paint this later as well. You’re looking for furniture grade in my opinion. Cheaper is not necessarily better, but your mileage may vary.
• MDF – I felt it would be heavier than the plywood I chose (even though my plywood was heavier than thinner plywood by comparison), but there were two aspects of MDF that gave me pause. Toxicity and Screwing. (Oh man, I used ‘anal’ in another post, now I’ve got screwing? It’s all downhill from here) MDF is quite toxic when you’re cutting it, as it’s formed by taking wood pulp and pressing it down with a generally formaldehyde based resin. That’s in the air when you’re sanding and cutting. Plywood itself can be bad enough, so toxicity was a big no for me as an amateur. Screwing is the next point – once you screw into MDF, it tears fibers apart to make room for the screw. You can screw into MDF once, where a wood screw in plywood can handle more room for error. You can use pilot holes and MDF screws to counteract this, but I wanted to get this project moving along.

Once again, as a total novice in woodworking, I chose the option with more give and take and less chance for killing myself with. Both are very viable choices, it comes down with what you’re more comfortable with.

I started turning my garage into a wood working nightmare. At least if I ever do anything with wood again, I’ve got tools and sawhorses for it. I was so ready, can’t you tell?

“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.” Tim Burton

Control? Come in, Control.

While there was woodworking going on, there was also some wiring of the guts together before anything was actually placed inside. These DIY projects tend to have multiple threads going at once, and I wanted to make sure the parts would work together. I highly recommend prototyping your control panel just like we made a cardboard mockup of the shell for no other reason than seeing something come to fruition early to keep momentum going, and give you a break from one part of the project to work another. Wiring up a control panel let’s you gauge sizing issues, determine layout, and hook all your guts up while you spend time configuring the software side (i.e. your joystick controls and your system / emulator / game play)

You could use very thin project board, scrap plywood, whatever. The Control Panel is by far the most important component of the external interface to your arcade. Consider button layout very carefully. Once you drill holes in wood, you should already have a good idea of button placement. An excellent resource for layout styles and history is is Slagcoin, and search DIY arcade forums as well like the Arcade Controls Forum

I opted to make mine out of spare foam poster-board. It was just sturdy enough to hold all the components together:

You may notice the markings on the buttons. They weren’t there when I got them. Another piece of hardware I purchased for this endeavor, and has been used quite a lot by C and myself for other projects is a Silhouette Portrait cutter. Works like a printer, cuts paper and adhesive vinyl, and that’s what I used to create the button labels – the nice thing is that they’re underneath the top button casing, no fingers working against the vinyl over time:

Things were starting to come together – mock-ups created, wood and plans finalized, and control panel wiring designed and tested with the Raspberry Pi. Now to actually make the cuts and start putting this thing together.

The post The Tardis Arcade Hardware Invasion appeared first on Krystof.IO.

A slice of retro

Last year I was using a Raspberry Pi to measure pH shifts in my aquariums that naturally occur from CO2 injection. I just received one of the newer Pi-2 Model B‘s and asked my self what next? What can I do with this thing? Searching on google for raspberry pi projects, I came across a wonderful little project called RetroPie. Retro gaming on this little credit card sized computer? Consider me signed up. As an aside, there’s numerous projects like this for the Pi, such as PiPlay

What is RetroPie? It’s essentially a project that integrates required components to launch, emulate, and gather meta-data about any ‘retro’ games you might install. It’s a large endeavor as it attempts to make the setup as simple as possible, and given that while it may only use one front end, there are many emulators necessary to make this happen, depending on what you want to support.

The Front side

Underneath the project wrapper itself, you’re looking at a simple yet elegant front end known as Emulation Station. Not just for your Linux Pi installs, Emulation Station works on Debian Linux and Windows. You don’t technically need a front end to play a game, but it surely helps. An emulation front end separates you from having to remember which emulator to play which game, how to launch it, how to configure it, etc. While there are as many front ends as there are emulators, Emulation Station is a good fit for the RetroPie project as it looks sleek but covers your basic needs of wiring menu to emulator to software. Even more important is the RetroPie script that just installs this all for you.

EmulationStation acts as your interface to select the game you want to play. As such, it supports various control mechanisms, from keyboards to joysticks, even your classic arcade controllers if you can wire them in yourself or they’re USB compatible.

Also included is a scraper. You’ve wired up a game you’ve saved onto your Pi, perhaps by taking that old floppy drive from your Commodore 64 and interfacing it with your Linux machine by writing your own drivers and wiring your own connection interface, right? No? Me neither. The task of collecting ROMs or Disk Images isn’t here, so move along. I’m assuming you’ve got some already. Ah yes, the scraper. Sure, you can add ‘Panzer’s East!’ as a menu item in Emulation Station to use the Vice emulator. But what about at least a little flair? Some box art? Some text describing the game? That’s where the scraper comes in. Scanning open and internet based databases containing game information and pointers to images, scraping turns your emulation station front end into more eye candy than you had before. I like that idea, though when I played around with Emulation Station I ran some scrapers as scripts in the background, as the embedded scraper seemed to be slow and a bit clunky to use, but perhaps that has improved.

The Back side(s)

RetroPie takes best of breed emulators for various gaming platforms and installs them all with default configurations. These emulators cover a wide range from Apple to NES, from MAME to Commodore, from Sega to Atari. These emulators, through the power of the RetroPie script, are wired into Emulation Station for you, no explicit configuration required unless you feel like tinkering.

While there are experimental builds of some emulators, the defaults generally work well out of the box, and some emulators are patched with the Pi in mind, taking advantage of certain pieces of Pi hardware or patched to work with the limited power the Pi has compared to a full desktop system. It’s a little give and take. While most of the early console systems worked well for me, DOSBOX emulation started to struggle. Since I’m a child of the 80s, a lot of my stuff was covered, but I also gamed into the 90s, so a lot of my DOS and early Windows games would need emulation on something with more oomph than a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. (The first generation Pi does work with RetroPie, but it suffers on the console side a lot more than the Pi 2).

If you’re used to tinkering with Raspberry Pi’s, you already know about images. The RetroPie project has you covered there and if you follow along and are already comfortable with the basics of Raspberry Pi usage, you’ll be fine. I wouldn’t recommend it as your very first Pi Project if you’ve never used one and never touched a Linux/Unix OS before. That’s more akin to hitting the ground hurtling instead of running, in my opinion.

Pi installed, let’s play!

One of my favorite games from the days when I had a Commodore 64 was a strategy game by Avalon Hill called ‘Panzers East!’. You’re the Axis powers and you must take out Russia before winter sets in, and you must utilize your Luftwaffe and supply lines to keep the pressure on while maintaining your ground.

My father and I played the crap out of that game. I could open that old game box if I still had it and there would be zero crap in there. He was Panzers and infantry, I was Luftwaffe. My mother had access to a copy machine (Yeah, I’m old) so we blew up the 8 1/2″ x 11″ map to fill the wall behind the old Commodore 64. This map, to be precise:

To this day, I still remember cringing every time I saw the phrase ‘Insufficient German troops, Russians retake Bessarabia’. God damn it, not again!
There it is, on a Raspberry Pi, running the Vice emulator launched by Emulation Station.

It was right about this point I knew I’d end up not only having a RetroPie emulator, but I’d actually try and build an arcade box out of this, because I knew I wanted Pops to have one. I couldn’t just hand him over a bunch of wires and an HDMI cable and say ‘Hey, let’s play a game!’.

So I knew I was going to make something to house a raspberry Pi in. I just didn’t know how far I’d go and what it would actually be. I just knew it was for Pops and it would be special. It wasn’t until I was past prototyping that I thought… “Tardis“.

The post How A Tardis Themed Arcade Build Began To Take Shape appeared first on Krystof.IO.