Turn a Raspberry Pi into a full featured, wall-mounted arcade game console in a weekend!
When I was a kid right down the street there was a guy who ran a mini-golf course and small arcade. I spent hours there growing up playing pinball (my favorite was The Adams Family), Street Fighter 2, and all the hits.
Just because I’m an adult now doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy those arcade games from my childhood. At one point I even considered purchasing one for my house! Unfortunately, space is at a premium so as much as I wanted a free-standing machine I just have no where to put it.
That got me thinking however, what about a wall-mounted version? Something that had the same feel as a classic Arcade machine but with a much smaller profile. I knew that many people had built game emulation systems using a Raspberry Pi — all I needed was a suitable screen, controls, and some wood and I figured I could build one myself.
When my fiancée and I moved in together we both had large flat screen TVs already. Since hers was newer that’s the one we ended up using in the house, while the other started gathering dust in the garage and would make a perfect screen for my game console. To build the case I decided to make use of a large cache of scrap particle board the former owners left in the garage as well.
Here’s a complete list of what I needed:
| Wood for the game cabinet (I used scrap from my garage) |
| 2x USB Joystick components and buttons |
| A Raspberry Pi Model 3 (the more powerful the better), SD card, and MicroUSB Power cable |
| A standard HDMI-input TV |
The most time consuming portion of this project is building the cabinet itself. Not being a woodworker, I’m sure it was harder for me than others. For my purposes, I wanted to build a low-profile cabinet that simply could be mounted to the wall and contained everything to power the game console. Here’s a rough design of what I was looking to build:
This rendering includes two holes in the middle you see are for cup-holders (can’t exactly play retro games without a tasty beverage on hand!) The final semi-circle in the back would be where the HDMI cable would come out to plug into the TV.
Since I would be mounting my game cabinet on the wall, I used a 2×4 in the back so I could safely secure the entire console to the wall-studs.
To make getting into the cabinet easy (in case something broke), I planned on installing hinges in the front so that the entire top could be swung out from the wall to expose the inner workings. This ended up being a great solution!
After a lot of measuring, sawing, drilling, and more measuring my cabinet was complete! I decided to go with a classic Super Nintendo button layout and used this useful image to figure out how to position everything:
Here’s what my cabinet looked like once the dust settled. During construction, I decided that I wanted to make sure I had physical USB access to the Raspberry Pi without necessarily having to open the cabinet (for a keyboard, additional controller, whatever). To accomplish this, I bought this very nice USB plug and drilled a hole to install it in the center of the cabinet as well.
With the cabinet built, next came wiring it all together. The joystick components I purchased worked on USB, where each button and the joystick itself was plugged into a control board, which then plugged into the Raspberry Pi via USB. Here’s a picture of how I mounted the components for the “Player One” position:
With everything all wired together, now came the fun part of bringing it all to life! Typically when working with a Raspberry Pi, you would simply download and install Raspbian (or NOOBS), flash it to a standard microSD card and turn the power on. For a game console however, instead what you want to do is use the awesome RetroPi Project. This is a project designed for exactly what we are doing here — you just flash their custom version of Raspbian to your microSD card, plug it in and viola! A retro gaming console!
All that was left is a coat of paint, installing the Player 2 controls, and I had myself a great retro gaming console ready for my wall.
As the final touch, I bought a bare-bones flat-panel wall mount to mount the display above the console and that was all there was to it!
