Lawson’s Arcade Machine

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

New to the board. Been a huge raspberry pi fan since it has been announced. Have done the xbmc media player setup. Have used it as a siri proxy to communicate to my control4 home automation system and have now finished an arcade cabinet which I will give to my soon to be 2 year old nephew for his birthday.

Anyway the build is quite simple. Initially I did a quick drawing of it in google sketchup so I would know what dimensions I would be working with. I wanted to use as many spare parts as possible so this was a major consideration for the design. The parts I had lying around were speakers, 15″ monitor, joystick parts and an ultimarc ipac.

On top of that I had to order in a raspberry pi, power supply, 32gb SD card and a hdmi to VGA converter.

So now my design has been completed

Next up cutting the MDF panels. Honestly I’m a programmer by trade so this wasn’t that great. Lessons learnt are use the right tools. Jigsaws don’t cut very straight and predrill all screw holes.

Next up sanded, apples the undercoat, painted, sanded, painted, sanded and you guessed it painted and sanded. Once the clear overcoat went on it really started to look the part.

Installed the monitor, speakers and joysticks. Had some 6-core security cable so used that to wire up the control panel.

Used the script to install all the emulators and front end (which was super easy by the way. Thanks for the hard work).

Did some modifications to cache the EDID key so that the hdmi to VGA adapter would work and started working on getting the game lists up and running.

Also since i am running an ipac i had to run a script at startup to program the ipac since it doesn’t save the keys to flash.

Also had to set it to program the audio output to analog output at startup.

Had to do some bash scripting to get the game lists auto generated with cover art but ended up working well.

Hopefully my nephew will like his present:)

[Anonymous]

Also noticed that it did not generate the Mame gamelist correctly. As such i took it upon myself to write up a script that auto generated the mame gamelist based upon the mame xml output. Have attached it for anyone who wants to use it.

Note that the image thumbnails are named the same as the rom name.

[karloss]

Very cool mate, im working on a table, its almost done, will share after..so have you scripted a version of the es-scraper to run automatically? Could you please share?

[Anonymous]

Nah its not es-scraper. having said that though you could probably setup a cron job to automate es-scraper though personally i wouldn’t do that as my rom collection doesn’t change that often.

Its just a bash script that looks at the directory and creates a gamelist based upon the filenames. It assumes that the images are named the same.

I have a hyperspin-fe collection which has all of the boxart already so it was quite easy for me to convert and make it look sleek.

Only thing it doesn’t do is the description.

It you still want it let me know.

[jonar]

What was the script that you run on startup regarding the ipac?

How have you configured this also? I’m just getting started with the ipac on my installation.

Cheers.

[Author]

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