Build a Desktop Arcade Machine with Raspberry Pi 3 and Retropie: Super Turbo Pro Edition

hi my name is Ronon and today I'm going to show you how to build a 1/3 scale arcade cabinet the two players using a Raspberry Pi I always start my arcade builds by focusing on the monitor since I kind of build from the inside out and the monitor is the most critical part that it needs to be sized and measured for the cabinet to fit it and look not stupid as far as ratios and an overly thick bezel and so on so this is a Dell monitor that I got at a yard sale was actually just in a free pile most of these Dell monitors or HP monitors any monitor that was used in the mid early 2000s 2010s are pretty much garbage now this one has DVI and VGA inputs the DVI is really the best thing here for the PI now I have to wedge apart the plastic which is quite the process because every monitor is built differently because we want to get to the raw TFT panel with the metal cage and the attached power supply so remove the button board this is the plastic that's coming off and I found out that you had to pry it from the front not the back so if you get one of these Dell monitors there you go and when you've torn it down this far make sure it still works good to always check intermediately so now I'm going to measure the bezel the overall dimensions and the window as well as the thickness of the monitor remove some more parts that aren't necessary to this thing so if it's going to go inside an arcade and I'm just be careful that button assembly that it doesn't break off or you crush it or cut the ribbon cable again testing things you know before you commit to anything make sure your parts work ok so I'm going to use a tape measure that has millimeters on it just be careful if you use any tape measure that jiggly part will give you your plus or minus error so these are the measurements that I got this TFT panel is 362 by 298 and most 17-inch monitors of this ratio on dividing the resolutions or dividing the interior dimensions I get a five to four ratio so if you get a 17-inch monitor that is this ratio there's a good chance that it's overall dimensions will be similar to this so take all these drawings I start drawing an arcade cabinet this is the third or fourth one I built of this size so I'm just making it look easy but this is what the 3d model looks like there's some strategic cuts and holes in places that make certain assembly and access to the arcade and raspberry pie simple and we'll cover those as we build this cabinet so here's what the resource requirements are as far as wood it's 2/3 of a 4x8 sheet of quarter-inch wood and a couple sheets of acrylic which is all optional so I cut this on a laser cutter I don't have a laser cutter but I have access to one at a makerspace that's going out of business so you know anyway I can't film there so this is these are the cut pieces and I'm going to just do a dry assembly so you can get an idea of how this thing goes together it is pretty self-explanatory but it is quite the process to film it and glue it at the same time so take it for this this is what it looks like when you start clamping it up I don't have a lot of clamps so I had to clamp this in stages in series either these are all the stages in series that I had a clamp so this is a pretty large cabinet for such a thin shell so we need to reinforce it structurally this is some common board that is like 2 bucks for 6 feet and I'm just cutting this to lengths to wine being superior this thing to give it a skeleton or some bones to reinforce everything I go glue crazy and again clamp it in stages because I only have so many clamps and this is what that looks like all right so we're measuring the depth of the monitor and that depth is a little bit different in all the corners but just good to have it referenced and I'm using these brackets that I cut out of the same quarter inch wood just stacking them till I get the thickness of the monitor and you can see we're doing a dry fit right here just to make sure before we proceed everything's going to fit and luckily and fortunately it does I'm also checking some spaces on the side because I want to add more structural reinforcement so I'm just getting the area where I might have some interference with some side brackets and cut more pieces to length and glue them in and this is what that looks like when you glue it so at this point let all the glue dry and we can start painting with a cabinet glued and that glue is cured and dried it's time to do my least favorite part which is prime sand and paint right now I'm using body filler to fill in any gaps and make the finger joints a little bit more uniform so you have to fill everything sand this and repeat it if necessary this is after one or two sands its if it starts to look flush and it feels flush it's good this is oil-based primer I'm just using a bent coat rod or coat hanger to mix it up and when you've made a mess then you know everything is mixed properly I'm painting some of the parts is what the first coat just kind of looks like I'm using a found brush to hopefully eliminate brush streaks if you use a bristle one and I'd usually do about two coats of prime for my arcade cabinets so the back and top look like when Prime goes on it is a fun process here's a second coat after the first is dry just follow the direction of the whatever pain you're using and second coat after the next second coat is dry sand everything with 200 to 400 grit I like to use an orbital a random orbital sander like this because it's just easier that's actually what I use on all my sanding and it goes to the spray booth which I don't have but I have a membership at a certain place so I use just forced oleum spray paint and I'm going to do three coats of spray paint on to the cabinet so I'm just spraying the accessory parts here's what the first coat looks like when it goes on it it's it's quite the difference once you get this first coat on it starts to look like an arcade so I leave at least two to three days for this thing to dry if it still smells like if it makes a small room smell like paint it's not dried still off gassing let it dry do not rush this step okay now that we have a finished and painted cabinet we're going to start first with a DC DC step-down regulator most of our DC supply is off of 12 volts and we need to drop that down to 5 volts for the Raspberry Pi so that's what this is but make sure if you use one of these they're usually sold as adjustable and we need to drop it down to about five point one five volts with a 12 12 volt supply plugged in that gets mounted with the barrier strip to the back of the monitor and we're also going to glue the monitors controls to the back too to save them space from the bottom of the cabinet next I start with a poster board and cut out my bezel with it this is kind of a place to live right now because I can put artwork behind it but most NeoGeo cabinets just have a solid black or solid red lcd bezel so keeping with tradition just go with that these are the monitor brackets that I'm going to install right now and put the two bottoms capture tabs in and I'm just securing this with number eight by 32 hardware if everything was measured correctly the monitor should drop down and fit perfectly plus - a couple millimeters and you should have plus a couple millimeters tolerance to jiggle things around next time install our single pole single throw switches this is so we can control the Raspberry Pi power the amplifier power and the back leg power from the front these are latching switches just two of them one of them I'll use the other is a spare but I'm still gonna put it in there and then these momentary buttons are going to be my volume controls all accessible from the front put the cover plate on with some nuts and bolts just to clean the seam up between the underneath of the marquee and the top of the monitor and this little pusher piece will force or help push the clear plastic pieces of the marquee in the speaker bracket these are three inch mid-range speakers with a two watt amp mounted in between them just common parts you can find on like MCM electronics wearing less in right channels and then the LED strip gets mounted to the same thing now this speakers sub-assembly you get tell them place with two brackets just on the left and right and that's secured with number eight hardware the Raspberry Pi 3 gets mounted vertically and that's so we can access the USB ports and the SD card from the back so we don't have to lift the cabinet up to get to it so the main AC power I'm using a just the monitor cable cut it into two parts and I'm using a hundred 20 volt switch that's illuminated so when it's on 120 lights up a little light in there and a standard power supply receptacle I take a standard outlet and wire into a shallow box and then the female end that connects to the monitor also go to that outlet in parallel so the switch is controlling anything plugged into the outlet and power going to the monitor that just gets secured in place with a cover plate as well and with the new work box we're just going to wire the plug receptacle to the switch connect ground straight to the plug receptacle and just the power for both poles hot and neutral and then that gets tucked into this box for safety reasons if it's 120 volts the connectors aren't being insulated so we'll just stick them in a box hopefully to keep watering fingers away and then we can just check our work and then this sub assembly for AC power gets mounted into the back and then we'll plug the monitor cable into the monitor so that's what it looks like now we'll wire everything else okay so I'm going to start by showing you what we just did which is AC now it goes to the monitor and that's which controls that note that our monitor has a internal 12 volt supply meant for speakers and we're also going to use an extra 12 volt supply for the PI and the LED backlight and the fan we use a barrier strip for convenience and the three switches I already showed you amplifier goes to one and note that our barrier strip and buck converter are on screen and the buck converter goes to the Raspberry Pi another switch gets wired to the 12 volt backlight and we have this other switch that I've already shown you that's going to control our fan and the fan is only for removing heat from the arcade which you can control from the front and use if needed and the volume bot buttons get connected to the amplifier and those are the momentary buttons that we wire to the front as well so here's everything and what it looks like if you're using the monitor that doesn't have a internal 12 volt supply there's another way you could do this and this is what it looks like note that you need to beef up the 12 volt supply to at least 3 amps for this and then you can just wire the speaker amplifier to your main line so not not complicated but I do recommend using a separate supply for the amplifier that is isolated from the Raspberry Pi because the pilots to generate a lot of noise in the audio as far as analog audio the fan which is optional this came from a dead ATX power supply I that just gets mounted to the rear panel with some nuts and bolts like so and that extra tab I glued on the bottom this is the artwork I made for the control panel on the marquee just basic shapes going with the NeoGeo theme and I printed it on a big cannon inkjet plotter is what it looks like and then I'll cut out these graphics and the marquee gets sandwiched in between two peaks two pieces of acrylic and I can smash it into the top with bolts and remember that little sliding piece that helps push the middle section of the marquee flush against the front because at this length it likes the bow I've mounted two Sanwa jfl joysticks to the control panel and I've cut out what I need to as far as the control kind of graphics and now I'm just going to insert the appropriate colored buttons and fasten them with nuts put the tops of the joysticks on and we'll take a break and look at the keyboard encoder so this is a K device it's just a programmable USB HID encoder that works great so it comes in a kit so I have to solder some things the other thing about this is the programmable part is removable from where you terminate all your wires so if you need to change things on the fly it's cool make a bunch of wires and land those into these screw terminals of the cade hub and then we're just going to plug in the appropriate wires the joysticks and the buttons from that termination point so this is what it looks like when it's all wired the keyboard layout or key inputs I'm going to choose for player 1 and player 2 are just something I've picked that kind of works well with name the great thing about this cade is it also has a hardware shift button so all your in puts can serve double duty as just like the shift key works on your keyboard so I'm going to have the basic playing buttons when you're playing the game and when you hold down the hardware shift button we get in another set of key that we can perform overall menu functions with the RK so this is just a convenience thing and it works really well for like exiting the game inserting a coin without having to take away buttons that are dedicated for playing this is the Kade interface and this is where you program what key customization you want this is me just selecting those keys for the shift command you program that to you encoder and then once it's program it'll reset itself as an HID device and your computer should recognize it and then you can remove that USB dongle and now plug it into the screw terminal breakout and connect a USB extension in this case I'll put the control panel in and then that USB extension gets plugged into the Raspberry Pi then I'll just add some aluminum standoffs with the rear panel in and the bottom tab clips into the bottom of the arcade and then two screws fasten in the back to hold the arcade to itself so don't forget when you do put the control panel in we have to wire the hardware shift button which is on the front of the cabinet this is what everything looks like when it's all wired and now we'll test some things out this arcade could use some flair so that's just what I'm going to do I'm gonna make some graphics for the side and the front there's some b-roll footage of the eBay vinyl cutter that I have it's nothing fancy but it definitely gets the job done if you've got no other place to go as far as seeing vinyl works so I just took some images I had on Inkscape turned them into vectors and just print out the MVS NeoGeo and some SNK logos you put transfer tape on the front pull the vinyl off and then apply it to the painted surface I'm just going to lay out where I think I want everything to go I recommend using like a square something to make sure your graphics are level and I'm doing this off-camera just because I'm terrible at it and every time I do it on camera I get it crooked so do one side repeat the other and that's what it looks like with graphics now let's talk about retropie retropie is the best for retro emulation on the Raspberry Pi and a discussion going to go to retro PI's website download the operating system or image for the Raspberry Pi you have unzipped the image and then use the uploader win32diskimager if you're using windows to write the image to your SD card once you have that written to the SD card depending on the class I recommend like a class 10 SD card for this since the speed will make a difference compared to like a class 4 insert the SD card into the finished arcade cabinet plug everything in and power on that supply power speakers and our key backlight and fan power optional of course it's a bit loud for how much air that power supply power supply fan pulls but no big deal alright so this is what it looks like when everything is configured and turns on it looks like an arcade cabinet I'm just demonstrating that it works if you didn't believe me so let's look at a two-player game and one that's a name you remember the shift key that the Kade can handle so now we're just pressing the tab button using shift and going into mains configuration to set all the player controls for player 1 and player 2 this is a convenient feature of this keyboard emulator so you can have dedicated arcade controls and then they all double as function keys or whatever you want else them to be on your keyboard you can see here all the keys are working just as intended so how do we move files over to the SD card the easiest way is to install pixel which we're going to do you can be built-in retropie scripts it takes a little bit but once you've got it installed you can just quit emulation station by pressing f4 type in sudo start X and it will load the pixel desktop environment and that way you can now navigate using a GUI filesystem drag-and-drop files from your flash drive that you can plug in via USB and you can also easily edit any configurations for retropie and emulation station and its really nice just to have a non terminal environment to do this so we're looking at the main retroarch config file where you can edit controls video actions and so on and then you can do specific configuration files for each emulator so these ones will take precedent over the overall configuration file and this is where they're located your other option is to just SSH through network or Wi-Fi and to do this we're going to use the built in install script or menuhin retropie enable Wi-Fi if you're using a PI 3 and then enter your credentials for that Wi-Fi now you have to go to raspberry pi config interfacing options and enable SSH now on your computer we're going to use using winscp if you log into the PI I haven't changed the credentials and once you successfully login so your PI has to be on and connected to your network you can just drag and drop files to the PI this is pretty fast and on the resources that your router can handle and you can also delete files from here as well so this is this is also really convenient once you've moved those files over just restart emulation station and then they'll show up your last option is using retro PI's built in file manager this is a little cumbersome but at least there's something there so on retro fide since like version 3.8 this has been a built in system it's just a standard Linux GUI where you can look at a source like the USB flash drive and then use function keys to do copy delete commands and you'll notice that the reason why I made some certain function keys available on my layout like this if I just want to quickly delete something on the arcade I can do that so there's lots of lots of details about retropie I'm not going to answer any other than I'm covered and if you have questions don't ask them in these YouTube comics go to retro PI's website look at their forms and read it all the answers are there do yourself a favor and take the initiative to solve your own questions before asking here because the retropie resource is such a good place to get answered that about wraps it up for this tutorial I hope it was informative in at least some caliber so whether it is designing your arcade putting it together painting it how to do graphics or how to wire the thing or even getting familiar with the Raspberry Pi I try to cover everything so you get an idea that it's not complicated when you separate it into each individual steps I do get the question asked a lot how do I get started what do I do for this and this and my best advice is if this is something you want to build you want to build your own arcade don't wait to learn just get started so you can all you need is like a jigsaw and some simple tools and as soon as you get started the faster you'll be sharpening your skills and eventually getting to the point where you satisfy the most important critic which is you if you're happy with what you built then what else would matter so I encourage you guys to just get started take a crack at this and scour the internet for resources because they're all there so thank you for watching and take care everyone [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I know I look like that dude from Vsauce but consider this maybe he looks like me

Channel: Ryan Bates

Views: 1,379,452

Keywords: Retropie, Raspberry pi, rpi, raspberrypi, emulation, retrogaming, neogeo, snk, mvs, howto, diy, laser, cutter, engineering, sonic, tekken, arcade, mame, machine, ssh, emulationstation, pixel, setup, retrobuiltgames, how to, sega, videogame, assembly, instructions

Id: psWCmLwvWBE

Length: 27min 15sec (1635 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017