Arcade Machine
So a good few years ago I bought a few arcade board off of a friend. Two were duff & still need restoring. The other one worked perfectly. Sadly it was a football game. Euro League. It is pretty shit but it is still pretty cool having my own arcade machine. I built all the electronics when I was still living at my parents & held off on building the cabnet as there really was not room at my parents for it. Plus they would bitch at me, they always bitched about the hord or something to that effect. It just becomes white noise in the end.
I needed an RGB to VGA converter, got one off eBay & modded the moitor to power it. Then I bolted the converted to the back of the monitor.
We also have a shot of the arcade boards. The one with all the EPROMs on it is the game that works. the rest all need working on. I have three boards in total:
1. Euro League (Works)
2. MisionXXX (Completely Dead) (Not A Porn Game)
3. Tubblepop (No Sound & Corupt Graphics) [Probaly RAM]
2020 happened, someone I loved has commited suerside. I was depressed & needed a project. So I resumed the project as I was now living in my own house. The case was retivly easy to build with standard hand tools & a jigsaw. I ended up doing this dureing work hours as my mentle heath was so bad. It helped building it so I was able to get back to a normal way of life for me.
I started with the screen & building the rest of the case around that. Turned out to be a good refrence point to build the machine. My DIY skills on this one were not to bad. Could have done with a few more coats of paint though.
The case fully spary painted.
The sparpainted button panel.
The arcade machine mostly built & waiting for the coin-op mechinisum to be programed & installed.
The main electronics I had to do for this paart was wireing up the controlers, aka control panel.
The only part that needed adding was the coin-op mech. The instructions to program it were crap, however due to them being cheap mass produced units. Someone had done a YouTube video on how to program it. So the inscructions went in the bin & I programed it from the video.
After that is was a case of testing it which required playing the game. It is very rare to actualy win againced the computer, the computer will kick your ass & fuck you sideways praticly every time.
The random asortment of coins to the side of the arcade machine were for testing the coin-op was operating as it should & only acepting 20p coins.
Modding The Box
My partner later on modded my arcade machine to house a Raspberry Pi running Retro-Pi along side the original Arcade Board. He was quite clever in the way he did it as he wired in a button control matrics on the same buttons the arcade board used. As the USB button interface used a common positive. That worked in his favor. Just use some diodes for isolation. A KVM switch changed between the PI & arcade board. One last switch would change between the arcade controls or the USB control interface to the PI. The only part that did not work with the switching mechnisium was the coin-op mechnisium (yet).
I just helped with some of the soldering, he did most of the work. Was nice seeing him take such intrest in my arcade machine.