Recently, we found an old arcade with the trash behind our office building. After a first brief inspection, we decided to haul the thing into our office. As we already had learned, most of the electronics was gone. All that was left was a board to control the viewing tube that used to be in there. The tube itself was gone too. The joysticks were still there however, together with the buttons. Both joystick and buttons (all 8 of them, 3 per joystick plus 1P and 2P buttons) use microswitches, and all of those were still present and in working order.So we decided to fill it up with some old hardware we had lying around. We even bought a second hand television, which we promptly disassembled and mounted in the cabinet. Luckily, we didn’t break anything and the tube still worked.

Meanwhile, we had been experimenting with a vga-to-scart convertor, with mixed success. Robin managed to get it working with his girlfriends television set, but with the one we mounted into the cabinet: no luck. We might just buy a cheap vga card with tv-out after all, we spent two days on getting the convertor right already. The problem seems to lie in the different impedance of the scart inputs.

Down below, we mounted a standard pentium board with some mem, cdrom and 3gb hdd. We inserted a network card in it, as well as a sound card. The television was only mono unfortunatelly, so we got ourselves two 40W power amplifier modules. Turns out we need to pay some attention to shielding the computer from the television hardware, we hear a lot of noise when the power amps are switched on.

So, the hardware is almost done. How about software? We plan to run all those retro games we all love on it, in emulators. The operating system is obviously going to be linux, which we already installed. Then a GUI menu that can be controlled by joystick offers a choice for settings, games or internet radio. So far, we have the c64 emulator installed. We plan to also install an atari emulator and of course mame, and probably a nintendo emulator.

We already had a lot of fun on this project, but once it is done we are just going to have more fun playing all those classic games, such as space invaders, pacman, outrun, quix, mario brothers, and many more! If you want to come over and see if you can improve our highscores, just drop me a line :)