Built from only the finest cheap plywood. Only been done by literally hundreds of others. I give you....an arcade machine!
Powered by a Raspberry Pi 2 B.
Here's how it was built, and how I fixed the issue I came across.
The old monitor I've used is a bit small for the space so I'll get a larger one, and put some perspex on the front to tidy things up.
The raspberry pi project Retropi was used. It comes with a nice front end menu system and all the emulators required. It simply needed to be installed on the SD card and then configured using the start up wizard.
Game ROMS were downloaded separately onto a 8Gb usb thumbdrive where they could be picked up automatically
I tried to keep things as simple (and cheap) as possible. The controllers were bought cheaply online and connected directly to the header pins on the Pi. The version 2B has more output pins than previous versions, otherwise a GPIO adapter may have been required.
Rather than needing drivers for joysticks or usb hardware, I used the following code from Ada to map the connected pins to keyboard characters. This was the simplest way I could find of providing input. once this code was installed and up and running all that was required was to figure out the common keys used to controll the various games and assign them to the relevant joystick/button connected pins. This works very well. Controllers feel good and responsive without any delays.
