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Hidden in this wooden box is what we call Mr Robotos Arcade, or just The Arcade for short. It’s an 8-bit emulator system filled with SMS, NES and SNES games. The box has six wheels, together they can support 180kg so it’s safe to sit on.

Inside The Arcade has a 15” display, two color coded playstation controllers and a red panic button. It also contains an old laptop behind the screen, running Ubuntu with all the emulators and a menu system.

The hardware

If you ever intend to build something like this, an old laptop is a good starting point. Just make sure it works properly and does not crash under heavy load (so you don’t have replace the laptop when you thought you where done, like I had to).

The frame around the screen is an old frame from an painting. We bought it at some second hand store and sprayed it black. Behind it is the screen from the laptop flipped so it faces outward. To do this we had to strip the laptop from almost all of the plastic and other supporting materials. The laptop we used had a screen cable that was about 8cm long so it was rather tricky to mount the screen backwards. We mounted the screen with some distance to the motherboard to maintain some airflow.

Two large springs (seen in the second picture) was mounted at the sides so the lid stays open. We had to add some metal around the springs to stop them from bending sideways.

The big red panic button is used for quiting games and returning to the main menu. The button is connected to a keyboard controller from a crappy old IBM keyboard (MMN-o has a boxfull of ‘em).

The controller has two rows of pins that forms a matrix of buttons. When a pin from the first row is connected to one in the second a key press is detected. I connected the red button to the combination for ESC, which I found by following the wires in the keyboard before disconnecting them.

The software

The Arcade has two menu systems. The first one is a small platformer game where you select a console by shooting at it. In the second menu you select which game to play from a very long list that also displays cover art, number of players, etc (for at least some of the games).

The system runs Ubuntu, but Gnome has been replaced with fvwm which uses a lot less resources than Gnome.

The first menu is created with PyGame and is based on a simple platformer i wrote ages ago. It’s not very fast but it works well enough.

The second menu is also written in Python but this one uses Pyglet instead. Pyglet is a neat multimedia framework for Python and creating the menu system was rather straightforward.

The second menu launches jkeys to translate the joystick presses to key presses the emulator can understand. An appropriate emulator is also launched with the selected game loaded and the menu is terminated to save some resources.

For finding good emulators I found this thread helpful. It has a list of emulators that works with Linux for at least 18 different platforms.

Have fun building arcade machines!