Tuesday 18 November 2014

Part 2: Design





Achievement Unlocked!
It seems so long ago since @auraltensn and I started this unique venture into the retro gaming pantheon. However, it has actually only been a few weeks! A testament to how much work has been put into this project and how much we have already achieved. (I initially wrote this blog back in October.)

My approach to Thrillhouse Arcade has been design and engagement of the public eye. So, while @auraltensn has achieved amazing results with the development of the machine I have been working at developing our brand name.

Thrillhouse Arcade
When coming up with the branding of Thrillhouse I guess I was listening to a lot of Retro New Wave music (Com Truise, Mitch Murder, Perterbator etc). @auraltensn and I have a mutual appreciation of the 80’s Sci-Fi aesthetic and subsequently Thrillhouse was dressed in a purple/pink colour scheme.


After some playing around we managed to change the Emulation Station interface to match our colour palette. Backgrounds and font colours were replaced for something more uniform. The next step of this process is to create a start-up video and replace the navigation icons.

Cabinet Design
Design of the cabinet is modelled from the original arcade machines from the early 90’s, but needed some modern manipulation. We no longer needed this machine to have depth its predecessors had, as now we are using a flat screen monitor. We don’t want any visible screws or T-moulding either, opting for something with a more professional finish.


The button layout is taken from an 8 button set-up with the two end buttons removed. Six buttons should be enough for most games. Three buttons have been added for menu/navigation commands. Not pictured are 2 buttons on the sides of the machine for pinball. You can download button templates here. We used a ‘borrowed’ road works sign to create the original template. The Coroplast was really easy to cut and would advise anyone attempting to build their own machine to consider 'borrowing' some to make your initial template as well.


Kickstarter and beyond?
I would love to see people get behind this project and I think we are on the right track to building something really impressive. I have drawn a series of stickers which will be packaged in a desktop trash bin with some other goodies. The plan being, if people donate a certain amount of money they will receive one of these packs if the target is reached, or we just have a bunch of sticker packs to give-away on launch night. You can follow the progression of the artwork on my artist page SevenHz.

Expect another blog entry very soon as we have actually been working away at the machine quietly over the last few weeks.










Monday 4 August 2014

Part 1: Planning

This is a quick background of how we came to start building an arcade cabinet, and our initial steps in the areas of research and development.

Myself (@auraltensn) and @sevenhz were hanging one day when we discovered that we both had an itching desire to build an arcade cabinet.  We started an inspired conversation, and discussed various MAME cabinets we'd seen online and in real life, and sketched a rough idea of what it'd take to build one.

After discussing the ideas of maybe using a netbook as the internal computer, I pulled out a BeagleBone Black I'd recently been hacking on after realising that a single board computer of it's type would probably be great to run a MAME system.  I think we have complimentary aesthetic taste, and grew up with many of the same consoles, games and 80's + 90's arcade machine fun.

Wow, inspiration really grabbed us there and we parted that day excited to get this thing going.

Enter PiPlay

I went on to do a search online for anyone else building arcade systems using small single board computers, and figured that if someone was doing it, it'd likely be in the world of the Raspberry Pi .  

It didn't take me long to find PiPlay.  PiPlay (formerly PiMAME) is available as a pre-built Raspberry Pi distribution, or you can just grab the code and run an install script on a freshly installed Raspberry Pi OS.  It includes emulators for a whole bunch of systems, a useful text based menu, and a web interface and FTP server for easily uploading and managing ROMs.  Mad props to Shea Silverman for the fine work in building this.  With PiPlay we're on a really good track for building the computing inside our cabinet.


Acquiring the first parts

You'll notice on the right hand side of this blog there's a link to our parts list.  This is an evolving document which was started to track what we need, what we acquire and what our costs are.  After discovering PiPlay the first thing on the list was a Raspberry Pi.  

The next thing we thought about was the control buttons and joysticks.  We met up again and sketched out some ideas for the cabinet and control board so that we knew how many buttons we'd need and what colours we'd want. What we came up with was:

   2 Joysticks - black.
 12 player buttons (6 per player) - black
   2 'pinball buttons' on the side of the control board - either white, red or black
   2 player start buttons - black
   1 hidden coin button - it's hidden, so doesn't matter
   1 menu/back button - white
 18 buttons in total required.

I'd previously done some research on how to interface controls to the Raspberry Pi, and although the Pi features GPIO pins, opinion online led me toward the IPAC, which is a circuit board designed to emulate a USB (or PS/2) keyboard.  It interfaces with arcade controls and maps them to keyboard keys, and by default is configured to send the key mappings used by MAME.

The IPAC-2

We found an ebay seller within Australia who was selling sets of 2x joysticks, 18x plain buttons, 2x player start buttons, and an IPAC-2, so we quickly ordered this.  We decided on 14x black, 2x white and 2x red buttons, so that we would have 2x red, 2x white and 2x black buttons after the gameplay buttons, so we could choose which to use as pinball buttons etc as we went on, and it's great to have a few spare buttons if we ever need them.

Next up I went to order our Raspberry Pi and thought about the other electronic devices we might need, such as sound amplification and a coin slot.  I found a small 20w stereo amplifier and WiFi dongle on Adafruit, a coin accepter on SparkFun (Adafruit were out of stock), placed some orders and we eagerly awaited delivery.....

Wednesday 23 July 2014

Welcome Thrillho

We're a couple of guys putting together an arcade cabinet, and this blog is here to track our progress and help others who are interested in doing the same thing.

Our intention is to build a full sized cabinet, with the computing handled by a Raspberry Pi. 

Some key intentions are:
  • It'll look awesome
  • Run it off 12V, giving us the ability to make it battery operated for portability and potential solar charging
  • Not to cut corners, use quality gear
  • Learn stuff
  • Have fun
So, Welcome Thrillho, I hope that this blog entertains and enlightens.