Arcade Machine

In 2012, I acquired a large, non-working shell of an arcade machine. It was for a Wizard of Wor game originally. Most of the internals were missing or broken. There was no screen, no main board and a lot of wires were cut. It looked like a donor machine for another project.

I spent a couple of months restoring and retrofitting a different system inside. I have cleaned the cobwebs, removed what was left of cabling and parts of PSU, fixed the shell and inserted new life into it in form of a new control system, OS, sound and lighting.

The shell was cleaned up and re-painted and front was replaced with new 2 person 8-way joystick setup. I remember drilling the holes for the buttons was quite tedious by using printouts of the layout. These days a hobby level CNC would make quick work of it and is usually available through Makerspaces.

The brain of the operation was an old Dell Optiplex running RetroPi. I found an office 4:3 monitor that did fit the opening quite well without much of a modification. Being a 1200x900 LCD panel of dubious color reproduction quality it was not anything to write home about, but did the job for a basement system. Having a bluetooth 2-in-1 keyboard/touchpad combo was very handy for debugging.

Build was finished by adding lights, a marquee and some car speakers. The entire contraption was quite heavy and cumbersome to move at 6ft tall. It lived in my basement for a number of years until I gave it away to a friend.