After being a bit fed up with PC and console gaming, and having a spare R-Pi4 laying about, I decided to take the plunge and build a bartop arcade cabinet. Still a couple of details to finish, such as speaker grills, trim for the marquee (and a brighter marquee light!) and the bezel to mask around the display and hide the internals but it's been a great little project. It's taken me, the missus and our friends back to our childhoods, and my nearly 4yo is taking an interest in it too! Definitely worthwhile doing and I can see this getting heavily used for a long time. IMG_1810 by Sentinel-R1 posted 19 Aug 2025 at 10:24
Alas, no build log. I had to do it in the evenings between work and juggling family life and speed was of the essence! If anyone is interested, I can share my sourced parts as that would cut down a lot of research for anyone wishing to undertake similar. Happy to provide more pics and some tech detail though, if anyone is interested.
If no one else - i would absolutely be interested. I don't have the space for something like that but watched a Linus tech tips episode where they made one!
Yeah, looks ace! Congratulations on achieving such a thing with a child in the house, I know how difficult finding time is
According a more recent video, Linus has now moved that build into his new "World class" Badminton & LAN gaming centre. @Sentinel-R1 Yours looks great!
Here's the linus one - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...usg=AOvVaw2mrxYG1eRBlb8L1km4P0oF&opi=89978449
Looks fantastic, I’m a sucker for illuminated controls What controls & USB interface did you use? If I could make one recommendation… look into CRT shaders. Not CRT filters, shaders. It’ll definitely stretch the Pi4’s GPU, but it should handle some basic shaders. Typically a CRT filter will just add darkened lines or black lines to the image to simulate scanlines. Shaders, on the other hand, are an entirely different kettle of fish: they change how the image is rendered. A good shader can simulate all the physical features of a CRT: scanlines, aperture grille, shadow mask, “subpixel” arrangement, screen curvature, even phosphor glow. It was these physical attributes of CRTs that make games of the era look so good. I would not recommend that anyone gets into CRTs these days unless they’re really into retro gaming… CRTs are expensive, difficult and dangerous to repair, hard to drive with modern tech, and ultimately do have a limited shelf life - the phosphor will eventually wear out. But a good quality shader will get you close, and it will make your experience so much better. All it’ll cost you is a bit of research & testing time.
Did somebody say CRT shaders? Awwww yeaaaaaaa. (Stock DOSBox renderer to the left, tweaked Lottes CRT GLSL to the right. Love me some shaders!)
I was about to try and dig that image of yours out of the archives, thank you for sparing me the effort
I'll have a look into CRT shaders then. This is a pre-built Pi Playbox image I'm using so there's limited customisation and with the amount of ROMs and how well it's organised and populated with metadata/descriptions, I'm reluctant to nuke it and build my own at this stage (never say never, though...) The controls and USB encoders are a bundle I got on Amazon after reading some very positive reviews in forums and Reddit. They're EG Starts brand. The sticks are 8-way Sanwa clones but comprising some genuine Sanwa components within. The button kits come in either 28mm or 30mm. My cab was pre-drilled for 28mm so I went with a complete kit containing 28mm buttons, 2x encoders and 2x sticks. The buttons are clicky microswitch so may not be to everyone's taste - particularly if you're used to playing on genuine Sanwa or Happ, but i've softened up the action with some silicone grease. I also lubed the stick pivots as one felt a little tight compared to the other. Both are now sweet and for £40 for the whole set, you really can't go wrong.
This is class. Wish i had something like this. I tried to show my kid the old amstrad 464 and he wasnt interested, the load times of a tape based game set him off to being instantly bored. Still makes me happy bringing it out on occasion, a beer, a little smile, and remembering sitting in my walk in closet at my parents old house for hours playing harrier attack and robocop
My bartop arcade machine is sat sadly in the corner of the spare room, unused since my last misguided attempt to upgrade ubuntu led to me having to face manually remapping ALL of the controller inputs This looks great - I never got around to finishing mine with decals/graphics or trim. This has just motivated me to try it out again!
https://www.instructables.com/Easy-Cab-arcade/ this is what I used to make mine if it helps anyone. I also had https://www.petrockblock.com/category/retropie-project/ retropie running on it until i bricked it
That badminton centre looks mad. Makes me feel like quite the underachiever, as does the fact that yet again I see a completed bit-tech project go up whilst my house is still covered in parts in boxes. Dreams and aspirations > time and skill, sadly.
