(figured I’d ‘do my part’ and make my first Lemmy post…!)
I love this thing too much to part with, but I’m gonna have to be honest: I barely use it. More often or not I retro-game on my Steam Deck…slightly more portable!
Has anyone else built their own units for retro-gaming though?
Made this guy back in 2015… Have made a couple changes here & there. I’ve had the itch to sell it and make a new one from scratch, taking into account things I’ve learned & wanted to change…
About 13 years ago, I made this fella.
https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg
It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.
It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.
I picked up a little bartop cabinet from a local arcade convention a few years back for a few hundred bucks. Ended up ripping out the Pandora’s Box (overseas piracy device with a bunch of dumped ROMs) and threw a Raspberry Pi into it. Got everything wired up with RetroPi… then realized I needed to add more buttons.
It’s been in that state for years lol
I built a small Batocera machine a couple months ago using an Odroid N2+ board. Pretty simple to get up and running and plays anything oldschool I could ever want. I get the urge to play it pretty regularly too, so I’m happy it’s ready to go when I am!
We’ve got a full-size arcade cabinet in our kitchen. Was a DIY passion project of my husband’s before we met, and it was fun for a while because the various niblings would play with it when they came round for the big family breakfasts we used to do. Sometimes if I was alone in the house I’d leave it on demo mode just to have some comforting background noise.
Niblings grew up, I got used to the quiet of a small town, and I don’t think it’s even been turned on in about five years because we’ve also got way more portable options 😅
Nothing wrong with not using it a ton. Sometimes it is about the journey not the destination. The thrill of building cool stuff vs the thrill of using it are two different things.
I’ve always wanted to but it seems dauntingly expensive and tricky to do. Any tips?
It’s on my to-do list, but the arcade hardware itself can get quite pricy. I may end up just using USB controllers instead of the buttons, sticks, and trackballs.
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Well, personally I turned a NES cartridge into a RetroPi console
