[khayman]

So this is possible in theory (I haven’t tried this so YMMV). I’ve been sort of noodling on it since I saw this yesterday (couldn’t sleep last night and was in my workshop playing with stuff) and I think I have a way you might be able to make it happen.

LED equipped buttons have 4 connectors: a signal and ground for the switch + a pos and neg for the LED. EmulationStation allows you to specify your launch commands and in doing so you could inject appropriate code (google sending commands using python from raspberry pi GPIO boards).

How I’d do it (again, in the process of building this it would likely change as I figured out what didn’t work). I would set up base configurations and plan those out. Let’s say I had (for argument’s sake) six buttons in a classic 3 columns, two rows layout. Number then 1, 2, 3 across the top row… 4, 5, 6 on the next line. Then figure out the configurations:
NES: 1 & 2
Atari: 1
SNES: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6
etc…

I’m not sure if the GPIO pins on the raspberry pi could drive enough power without causing a drain elsewhere to run all of them (again, they might… might not). So I might consider hooking up my Arduino to my pi, let my pi send the command and write scripts into the Arduino to receive the commands to turn on/off the LEDs. LEDs are connected into the Arduino. It would take some tinkering and you’d want to build the appropriate circuits on a breadboard. Your Arduino script might be something along the lines (again, not testing this or really checking it as I’m at work right now… just sort of one-offing it):

void setup() {
   Serial.begin(9600); // or whatever it needs to be between the two
}

void loop() {
   if (Serial.available() > 0) {
      int command = Serial.read();  // get our command
   
      if (command == 1) {  // Atari
         lightupAtari();
      }
      if (command == 2) { //or whatever 
      }
   }
}

void lightupAtari() {
   digitalWrite(13, HIGH);  //assuming pin 13 is hooked up to drive button 1
}

void lightupNes() {
   //write out your commands for lighting the appropriate buttons.
   //it might be good to chain several buttons to one pin if you can 
   //and think about them in groups.
}

void lightsForES() {
   digitalWrite(13, LOW);
   // and all of your other pins, make sure to turn them off.
}

[khayman]

Ugh… it was something stupid. When moving files around the other day I must have done something like this.

mv gauntdl.chd /opt/retropie/config/mame-advmame/image/gauntdl/guantdl.chd

Misspelled the target name and renamed the file.

After fixing that brilliant mess-up it still didn’t work but that was because it was saying that the ROM and CHD weren’t a match. That’s at least a problem I can understand.

[khayman]

Mine links to /home/pi/.advance/image which is basically the link to /opt/retropie/config/mame-advmame/image. I’ll try pointing it directly there and trying again when I get home.

[khayman]

So I’ve been playing around with these and not getting anywhere. Working on Gauntlet: Dark Legends.

Inside my /roms/mame-advmame directory I put gauntleg.zip. I can see it under MAME in ES.
Inside the /opt/retropie/config/mame-advmame/image I’ve tried both putting gauntleg.chd inside the base dir as well as inside /gauntleg.

I still get it erroring out that it can’t find gauntleg.chd.

Help?

[khayman]

For mine I used 1/8″ high density fiberboard (Masonite) to create a bezel around the monitor. The rest of it was built out of 3/4″ MDF except the control panel which I wanted something more sturdy so it’s 3/4″ hardwood plywood (wanted where people would be pounding on and pushing to be a little sturdier).

[khayman]

scar811, I got sidetracked and didn’t test it, I’ll probably work on it a little later tonight after the wife’s in bed if I get some time. I’ve been busy on other parts of the build.

[khayman]

I create a folder under each rom folder called “+Untested” (the + puts it at the top). I browse through there and try different games. If I like them and they work well, I ssh in and copy them to the parent directory and restart ES.

It’s probably more work than is necessary but it seems to work for me.

[khayman]

/boot/config.txt

Add it in there.

[khayman]

Saves hassle in the retroarch emulators as the two player unit does not play nice with two player console games.

This is a pain. There are unofficial workarounds that involve getting the source and modifying it to support two controllers but that’s obviously not ideal. I ordered and ipac 2 and am going to use the xin-mo for my little portable single player build that I’m doing next.

[khayman]

phrazelle and chillimonster, those are some awesome builds. Really great job.

[khayman]

I think it’s that Ralink 5370 adapter. Both you and lakespiral have it and are having issues when everything else seems normal. Also on that link that lakespiral posted people are still having issues even with the “fix”.

[khayman]

I haven’t gotten that far yet. Right now everything is on my workbench in my garage while I continue to tinker with the electronics, but there’s something similar here:
http://www.instructables.com/id/2-Player-Bartop-Arcade-Machine-Powered-by-Pi/?ALLSTEPS

I’m sure if you do some reading around online you can wire it up.

[khayman]

There are tons of stores online. If you’re in the US go to FocusAttack. If you’re in the UK Ultracabs is pretty good. I’ve got some stuff shipped to me from Arcade World UK that should arrive in a week or so. It seems like the Europeans have way more options than we do in the states!

First, read and plan a lot out before you buy anything.

So here’s what I’m doing (and your mileage may vary). The joystick and top buttons are suzo-happ competition. The front buttons (in the pic) were originally suzo-happ but I had to order different ones because of a sizing issue (that’s what’s shipping from Arcade World UK). You’ll need a control board to interface the controls to the RPi, most people love the i-pac 2. For speakers I bought the cheapest car stereo speakers and cheapest little amp I could find on amazon but a lot of people repurpose old computer speakers. Lighting is really any strip-based lighting. Mount a power-strip inside your box, plug everything into that and wire it to a single power button you mount on the back. Marquee can be ordered online. Paint. T-moulding. Plexi. Later I’m going to add in a few more buttons to do things like save state/load state within the emulators.

I’m still working out the circuit to shutdown the pi gracefully (as I’ve heard questionable reviews about the mausberry ones). The plan is to have a capacitor which stores enough juice to run it for a few minutes, then when power is cut it sends a command to the pi to shut it down. I’m fairly certain I can figure it out and there are more than a few guides online.

Just do your research, build it, and then show it off in the other forum for people’s projects. You can also get a lot of good support there.

[khayman]

I’m finishing up the basic build and configuration of mine (pic attached). Almost ready to paint! An online kit would’ve been way easier but I kind of wanted to make it my own.

There are several different light guns available for computers. You could probably look around and see what’s available for purchase and then research those models and see what the linux support is like. It’s probably not going to be easy if it’s even supported at this point. You might try WiiMotes but I don’t know how well those work or are supported.

That being said, these projects are advancing quickly and it won’t be long before you might be able to add on light guns even if you do build one now.

[khayman]

Yeah, I had found that forum when I first started researching this which I thought was weird as I could’ve sworn I’d read somewhere else that FBA supported CHDs. Unfortunately a lot of the time the info out there is old and things have changed so it comes down to guess and check.

I logged into my home server and repackaged all my ROMs with CHDs for AdvanceMAME and transferred then to my Pi. I’ll test on those tonight when I get home.

[khayman]

Floob, thanks for your help. Before bothering you more I’m going to do some more experimentation on my own and see if I can figure it out. I was just seeing if you knew off the top of your head. I can’t really find good CHD documentation for FBA online anywhere. I’m thinking I might take what I have a rebuild the romset for one of the other MAMEs and see how that turns out.

Frankly I’m still in the middle of my cabinet build so there’s a hundred other things I still need to do… I just want to skip to the fun parts first. ;-)

[khayman]

Floob, great input. For FBA chd’s would we assume
/opt/retropie/configs/fba/image
?

[khayman]

Yeah, I’ve got two different models, one for each of my Pi’s and the way I described above worked for both of them out of the box with no additional software needed.

Panda PAU06 (ordered from Amazon)
And this one: https://www.adafruit.com/products/1012

Good luck.

[khayman]

I wouldn’t mess with static settings, personally. I’d let the router use DHCP to identify and configure it and then if you want you can just have the router assign it a static IP once you’ve got connectivity. Even easier, go into raspi-config and set it up to advertise itself on the network as “retropie”. Then when I’m home I can just ssh pi@retropie and be on there no problem.

Also that’s a pretty generic name for a wifi adapter… do you have an actual model number? The lsusb command should list out what you’ve got plugged into USB. Might be helpful to make sure that it’s supported on RPi and that you don’t need any additional drivers or anything.

[khayman]

Can you give the output of this (go ahead and rip out the SSID/PW if you want):

cat /etc/network/interfaces

Also what model wifi adapter do you have for RPi?

[khayman]

Thanks, yeah I still haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do yet. I’ve got some additional buttons from Adafruit that I can wire to the GPIO pins. Thinking about going that route, but it’s still up in the air. Luckily the way we designed it the control panel is removable/replaceable so I can always re-cut that piece if we don’t like our setup.

[khayman]

This looks similar to what I’ve thinking of doing for a future project (after I finish my cabinet build I’m working on now… wife says only one project at a time). I was thinking of maybe just getting a basic plastic or aluminum project box and cutting the holes for a joystick/button setup and mounting the pi and a rechargeable battery inside. What kind of lifespan are you getting on the pi off of the 3000MaH battery while gaming?

Looks great though!

[khayman]

Not too difficult. From command line:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Near the bottom add the following lines:

allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
   wpa-ssid "whatever your ssid is"
   wpa-psk "your network password"

Ctrl-x to exit nano, it will ask you to save. Just hit Y and then enter to accept the filename. Reboot your pi using:
sudo reboot

What I also did that helps is tell raspberry pi to reconnect to my wifi in case I do something stupid like reboot my router. Here’s what I did.

sudo nano ./wifi_checker.sh

Inside good ol nano I used this script:

#!/bin/bash

if ! ifconfig wlan0 | grep -q "inet addr:" ; then
        ifup --force wlan0
        sleep 10
fi

Save and exit like you did before. Then:

sudo chmod +x ./wifi_checker.sh

Next you want to schedule that to run to check the status of your wifi connection. To that we go to crontab.

sudo crontab -e

Go to the bottom and enter the following line:

*/5 * * * * ~./wifi_checker.sh

Exit and save and you should be good to go.

[khayman]

I’m going to echo herbfargus, this sounds like a bad rom to me. You might try playing it on another platform to confirm or getting a different copy.

[khayman]

There’s a lot of instructions between the github wiki page as well as this forum. You’ll need to also look at the configuration documentation for the individual emulator you’re using. A little google and searching the forums and you’ll get the commands for exiting an emulator.

[khayman]

…like a french girl? ;-)

Not to kick a dead horse, but it’s worth researching what individual components of a script do before going ahead and just executing it. If you’ve got something mostly working for you already it’s better to figure out what doesn’t work rather than just blanket apply a script designed for a vanilla image. Not that you asked for help (which you probably should have done… politely) but to fix you might try mounting the SD card on another computer and reverting es_systems.cfg.

[khayman]

I was wrong, don’t need X

http://www.maketecheasier.com/watching-videos-on-raspberry-pi/

[khayman]

You could probably write bash scripts to address this and edit emulationstations launch commands. I’d check the emulationstation documentation. Instead of launching the appropriate rom, you launch a script which plays the video in a player and then when complete launches the rom. Though I’d think that the video player is going to want to launch inside X so that could be a bit (read: a lot) tricky.

[khayman]

That’s pretty shady.

[khayman]

More pics…

[khayman]

More images from work done this weekend. Had to rework the front panels to get the angles right both for the diamond-shaped front as well as the downward slope so that took a long time. Test fit all the major components together, finished drilling out the screw holes (will be fitting the whole thing together with both screws as well as glue) and made sure that the speaker grills were good to go. Also designed it such that when complete we’ll be able to remove the top control panel if we don’t like the joysticks or buttons and just re-make that piece rather than have to scrap the whole thing.

To do next weekend:
1. Few more minor cuts needed.
2. Going to re-cut the control panel piece from hardwood instead of MDF as we want it a bit more sturdy once we start to cut holes in it for joysticks and buttons.
3. Finish the assembly and paint.

To do this week:
1. Design and order marquee, plexiglass and lighting.

[khayman]

I’m guessing that this suggestion would probably be better directed to the Emulationstation development team as that’s what generally handles display.

[khayman]

RPi 2 builds a lot faster.

[khayman]

I really like what you did there. It looks nice and clean. You may want to check your blog, it looks like some of the images are broken. Great job on modding the XBox controller too.

The one problem I’m trying to crack is to make sure we can shut down the box without messing up the image. I’m going to back it up once I have it where I want it, but I want something which will detect the power down and issue a shutdown command. I’m thinking maybe doing something like this (http://mausberry-circuits.myshopify.com/products/shutdown-circuit-use-your-own-switch) and then wiring up a single switch to a power strip which will control the screen, pi, amp and lighting. I believe that circuit should work to correctly power off the pi appropriately.

Either way, all the woodworking equipment is at the parent’s house so the build is coming along slowly. That and both myself and my stepfather are perfectionists so we tend to make progress at a fairly slow pace. I don’t think I’ll have time to work on it this weekend but I’m hoping by the following weekend we can get some time and finish screwing/gluing the wood together and start painting.

[Author]

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