My own arcade in a (shoe) box

Hi there! We live in a gaming world full of tablets, computers and video games but do we know where these came from? So I decided I would do my own type of history lesson. I went back to the retro days and found where this all started. So I wanted to build my own but on a  low (shoestring) budget. Find out how to build an arcade in a shoebox by continuing to read this post...

Materials required:

1. A shoe box (I'm sure you'll be able to find one in your house)
2. A Raspberry pi (around 40 dollars at a place like sayal)
3. Some connection wires
4. An interface board that can emulate a keyboard. I used an Ultimarc iPac board rather than all the I/O pins on the RaspberryPi because I wanted to build it easily with no additional programming. You could call it being creatively lazy!
5. A joystick and buttons
6. A wire stripper
7. A exacto knife
8. Finally a whole load of perseverance!!

As you can see from the materials I made the design easy with a interface board instead of wiring up the buttons to the I/O pins on the RaspberryPi. This way, any game that can be controlled with a keyboard can be controlled with retro looking buttons. No programming required!

The steps to success

• Browse the web with patience but I'm assuming you already did because you're here.
• Then test repeat Prototype then test repeat prototype then test.
• Did I mention you have to Prototype then test.
• Finally, build on the success of others. There is no need to reinvent yet another wheel. Good folks at Retro Pi have made things easy for you folks. They've done all the software and a lot of emulators are already installed.

Steps:

1. Quickly prototype the basic system... The first and probably one of the most important things to do in a successful project is to test to make sure that it works as a prototype. So I made sure that my buttons, my micro-switches, my interface board and my RaspberryPi worked. In this process you may expect to find a few glitches with your switches. But an easy way to check if your switches and buttons are good is with a continuity checker. Another bug you may expect is if your interface board is not working. A common problem is wiring of the test button to a wrong key in the interface board. There are many different options and it is very confusing so keep trying till it works.

2. Now set up your joysticks and your buttons with the micro-switches. There should be four switches in total that are mounted in the corners of the joystick. There should be no problems in that area but if there are please do report them in the comments section and I can try to help.

3. Cut your shoe box open and measure to the size of your buttons and your joystick. In this section if you are under twelve of age I recommend the help of an adult due to use of extremely sharp knives. You will be using an Exacto knife to cut open the holes. The better way to be cutting open holes in this is by using a paper and then copying it down onto the shoebox.

4. Now place your buttons and joysticks carefully into the shoebox. In this section you have to be extremely careful because if the microswitches are damaged  then you have to get another set of switches. Another thing is that the joystick will need to be screwed in to the shoebox so that it doesn't fall down or rattle too much -- like when you are in the middle of some major gaming session.

In the following step you may may want to use a wire stripper -- Man's second best friend...

5. Now attach the wires to the sensors and  hook them up to the interface board. When connecting to the switches make sure that you are connecting to those pins that close the circuit only when the switch is pressed. Use a continuity checker to figure out the right pins if the switch has more than two pins. Another thing that I suggest is that you make it so that all your wires are different colours (colour coded). This way it's easier to wire it all together and trace the wires in case you want to confirm the wiring of the correct buttons to the correct input pins on the interface board.
Connecting from the buttons to the interface board is quite simple. Connect one wire from each button to one screw post in the interface board. Each screw post is marked with a keyboard button name like up, down, return etc. I used the standard MAME key assignments.
Finally, hook up all the ground connections (one each on each button) and then connect them to the ground screw post on the interface board. Done!























6. Attach the raspberry pi to the interface board through a USB cable.

7. You are almost ready to have a lot of fun. Now you have to install and setup the RetroPi software with ROMs in the RaspberryPi. I followed the steps in LifeHacker blog to complete this.

Don't forget to enjoy and post back your experiences.