One of my first Raspberry Pi projects was creating a retro gaming console. I started with Retro Pie at first but almost a year later I see myself using Recalbox instead. Both options are great, but I found an image based on Recalbox that had over 49 different consoles and more than 11.000+ games ready to play.
As I write this post my Windows PC is working on copying that image its content, so I can strip it down to a smaller version (and in English, it is now in Portugese) so you can install it on a smaller (cheaper) microSD card than the 60 euro 128GB microSD I had to buy to use this image.
all praise go to Andrés Jimenez Galisteo Jr. who greated this image. As said it holds almost 50 different consoles from all the populair ones like NES/SNES, Playstation and Sega systems to the lesser known Vectrex, scumm VM to even handhelds like Gameboy, Lynxx even the first Watch&Game handhelds but even Mame roms and Apple, PC and MSX homecomputer games. Yes people, it is one hell of an image!
My main goal is to build a bartop Arcade machine with Mame games using the image of Andrés Jimenez as the base system. The project combines not only Raspberry Pi stuff, but some small woodworking and maybe even some light soldering. All and all a fun little project.
On my blog I will report back to you what my progress is with as much detail I can give you. This is part 1.
Getting extra inspiration
I usually start with watching Youtube video’s on the subject but in this case Pinterest is also a great place to look for idea’s and helpful tips. I started a mood-board on my Pinterest page to bundle all those idea’s.
I ordered buttons and joysticks via Aliexpress to connect to my Pi. I found an old TFT screen especially for the Raspberry and harvested some speakers from an old broken TV.
On Pinterest I found the button layout for the bartop. Sure, you can just drill some holes and insert the buttons, but putting the buttons in the right distance from each other is not only more ergonomic, it is also more beautifullerderder.
The templates I found were all images and printing them would not give the correct measurements. Therefore I made a .pdf file from the template I am going to use so that you can download it and just print it to get the correct size immediately. Your welcome. You can download it from my Github page here.
So for now I have printed the template, downloaded the image, installed it on a Pi and connected all the hardware (excluding the speakers for now) in order to test and making sure all is working properly. And enjoying some Donkey Kong in the process.
The coming days I will look for video’s on building the bartop, shopping for some materials to build it and further editing the image for use in the bartop Arcade.