its taken me a long time to finally grab an emulator. Was hesitant at first but the ability to play MAME became a necessity. I can’t collect arcade cabs so this is fucking rad! However, I been going nuts making splash screens and doing whatever I can to make this thing a permanent arcade in my house.
right now I have 90+7800 games,full US snes, a few Sega cd and neongeo pockets. 6 gba favorites, my power pak full nes , and 3000MAME(which I am going through and sorting/removing)to make my own perfect rom collection. CURSE YOU MAJHONG!!!!!
I made my own splash screen video boot screen which is super cool, mastered Selph’s scraper and navigation through cmndline/IP connection.
i want to eventually only have MAME and daphne libraries. ( despite overcoming all the figuring out of rom sets and format and folder placing, navigating cmdlines, etc....Daphne’s a bear to get running. That will be the last thing I do before “ finalizing” this build. 
So now the real kicker comes in. I saw the arcade 1up mod you can do and there’s nothing I can do to stop myself from a third home console build. ie NINTV and SegaTV.?if you follow my posts at all you may have seen these.


has anyone here tried this mod? I’ve watched the videos and it’s not as simple as switching out  the boards naturally but it’s still in my pay grade to do. 
This entire experience has been very exciting for me. I’m sure my girlfriend misses me and/or is ready to leave me, but I’ve been learning a ton and have a lot more confidence in rom collecting. I’ve learned everything the hard way though. Which is good for a guy like me to help remember. I can’t wait to build this GD thing. If you tried this and it sucks, talk me out of it.

they are not totally terrible... I snagged one of the asteroids ones when they went on clearance. I think I will have spent about as much as a candycab if I could have found one locally though by the time I am done. Ikea lack is pretty much the perfect riser imo. I found rpi kind-of underpowered so you might consider throwing an x86 mAtx pc in.

Had more fun building this minimalist hitbox though  

That's sweet! Hit box is dope too!I'm looking forward to it. I'll post about it when I do it.

Thanks! Look forward to seeing what someone else does with it. I did this board off Amazon that was a pretty easy swap VSDISPLAY HDMI VGA DVI Audio LCD... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N4FL...

My original asteroids board didn't work at all, but besides that everything went pretty smoothly. Good luck and post some pics along the way.

Oooo thanks for the part reference!

 

So I started the project and mostly done at this point. If anyone is thinking about doing this, it's super easy, really. Assuming your arcade emulator is already set up. So... that said, I was not without error of coarse. And for some reason it did reset various setting from my raspberry pi that needed to be reconfigured but generally pretty smooth. I have yet to do the joystick build but here's what I got so far.

Bare with my method here.

https://i.imgur.com/MDOB9FE.jpg... This is the stock cab. The marquee is in funny light. It's not actually illuminated

https://i.imgur.com/B0rC5SM.jpg these are the components I’m adding.

https://i.imgur.com/LcbiWXS.jpgThe red box is an $8 little 12v 2channel amp. I repurposed the speaker but they will be upgraded soon

https://i.imgur.com/DXqS95J.jpg this is a little vga hdmi converter thingy...simply plug and play to the model M170EN01 1 arcade style monitor which gives this cab most of its value, honestly.


 https://i.imgur.com/dLwAvbR.jpg this is what the back of the monitor looks like. In that little box is the game info and controller hook up. And this is what it looks like when removed.
https://i.imgur.com/z11MeGe.jpg the wide white ribbon cable is the controll deck hook up and the others are power and all the other junk it needs to run..(for the laymen) I will add...that tho the power supply is hooked up to show you where it goes, it is not plugged in. ALWAYS DISCONNECT POWER SOURCE FOR SHIT LIKE THIS.
like I said, you simply unplug the cables from that board and plug them into the new vga hdmi converter board

This is where I messed up. The new board came with an extra female attachment already connected to the end of one of the wire clusters. I didn’t notice at the time and thought I had a funny model or something and cut the existing one like an ape brain so I could plug it in. https://i.imgur.com/mUTyH7I.jpg (unnecessary) I if you try this... don’t be like danenes, use your head.

https://i.imgur.com/9F3TqnF.jpg after that’s all hooked up you connect the speaker wires to the amp, plug your pi or Pandora’s box or whatever into the vga/hdmi and power that bitch ON!
havnt ordered the parts for the controllers yet but I’ll post that later as well. Thanks for checking it out!

 

Nice work man! What's the plan for the controls? I can't decide between leaving the brooks ps4 adapter I have in and actually trying to build a panel.

Well,  I can’t find a streetfighter panel thats just the top wood overlay. it always has the control set up unit for like 70 bucks. I’m going to download a template and just buy some MDF to cut and drill out myself I think. And the Pi 3b+ has 4 usb ports, I’ll be able to leave the keyboard set up and both controllers and still have one open port for whatever. Probably this set with the USB converter boards.
https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eb...

Here is the final product. The sticker overlay for the controller deck just came in today so I literally just finished now. It's not as tricky as it looks to do the control panel. But it's tedious. Thanks for reading. Feel free to ask any questions. Just scroll up and down in the link for all 6 photoshttps://imgur.com/a/kmicUEo

https://imgur.com/a/52WQIrH oh yeah one more!

That is awesome! Looks alot more finished than mine. Nice work!

Thank you very much! I’m very happy with this project. It plays very well too.Took a little while waiting for parts but it was worth the trouble. Last thing I will do is a minor speaker upgrade because this now doubles as a jukebox via 1/8 aux cable. and being a 4 foot tall speaker cabinet, this thing sounds good, now, but will sound great soon! Thanks again 
 

That's RAD!!!

I was debating on doing this. What are your overall thoughts? Are you happy with it? Worth doing? Looks like the Walmart near me has one of the cabs at $100 off.

I think the general consensus is that you can count on needing to replace the buttons and sticks with something better, and that you'll need to fabricate a control panel overlay to prevent wear.

The machine is tiny, but saving the space and the weight, for the novelty of the form factor is probably still worth it, for a project box.

 

I actually have new buttons and joysticks for a previous project that was just wayyy more involved with restoration than I wanted, so I actually have 3/4ths of all the materials. I'd just need the pi and a pair of the cheap keyboard decoders for the buttons, and maybe an amp/speaker setup. That's what makes this project kind of appealing for me. Plus the benefits you mentioned.
 

If you're using a Pi do you need keyboard decoders?  Or can you just wire directly to the digital IO portion of the pi?

 

Looks like gpio probably works https://github.com/adafruit/Adafr...

Might be worth grabbing a wireless keyboard anyway for ease of use. I hooked a 360 controller to the pi zero I was poking at and ended up having to switch to keyboard occasionally to run a command or setup emustation or whatnot.

If you already have a pi set up its totally worth doing. The monitor itself if your into doing arcade builds is worth it alone. I love this god damn thing. I bought an extra hdmi converter and thinking about making one for just nes and snes with wireless controllers and no joystick. Also there’s a guy on eBay selling the controller panel like I made, but his are black pvc and 25$. I made my own because I have the tools and the piece of MDF cost 6$. Look in Home Depot for project panels. They’re 3’x2’. Pm me with any particular questions you may have. I paid 191 for 1up. 35 for pi, 19 for hdmi converter 9-13 on the amp and 44 +6 on new controller board. 
 

Not sure I understand the question. The joystick and button sets come with a USB encoder that you plug into and then just plug USB into the pi. my keyboard is inside of this machine hooked up via USB. I don’t use the gpio. But I had the pi completely set up before I installed so that I don’t need to change things
. If I want to add games I do it via IP from my MacBook. If I want to make drastic changes I open the back and pull out the keyboard. Hope that helps.

Yeah, I have all the Happ arcade buttons and joysticks. I don't have a pi, but might pick one up if I do end up doing this. It looks like the Street Fighter cab would be my easiest route since it has all the buttons already drilled out (sans maybe one 2 more), though it's $100 more than the others at my local Walmart ($300 rather than $200).

Aside from all that, though, the quality of the cab is good enough you think? Did you prop it up on anything for the additional height, or are you using a stool or some such to just sit at it, or did you buy the additional stand for it?
 

Yeah I just use the kitchen table chair. They’re short. Mine doubles as a juke box aux in too. I was thinking about building one of those bases that holds a sub in it. I’ll definitely build one if I need one tho. Can’t abide paying  50$ for something so simple.

Again tho. Street fighter cabs are the priciest and you have to completely dismantle it anyway. I'd buy a cheaper horizontal screen cab. Unless you want street fighter graphics, and grab that black pvc one for 25 bucks.
edit. Idk. 6 of one, 1/2 dozen othe other I suppose. I just went for the asteroids because it’s the most neutral. And on clearance. Least amount of logos 

Yes, the question was whether you tried using the GPIO pins rather than bothering with the keyboard encoder.
(and whether you knew of any merit to doing so, in terms of possible ghosting concerns)