Back to the Arcade - Part 12 - Leaderboard

The latest addition to my game room and more specifically to my arcade machine project is a leaderboard.  One of the fun, competitive things back in the day at the arcade was to achieve the high score which is proudly displayed on the screen in attract mode for many of the games.

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Early games like the Pac-Man series or Space Invaders maintained a high score but didn't have the leaderboard style where one could put their initials and proudly show off their skills.  ​Later games allowed the input of the players initials (usually limited to 3 characters) which would be displayed in the attract mode between game play where players could maintain bragging rights until they were bumped off the top of the list. One problem; if the machine was turned off at the end of the night to conserve energy. Many of the high scores were stored in RAM, which meant that if the machine was turned off, the scores were reset.

Since my machine is a multi-game machine, it has the leaderboard function for each of the games that originally had that feature, but in order for someone to know if they have been  bumped from the top position they would have to launch that game to know the results.  Due to this clunky way of getting this information I had a bit of a brainstorm of how I could make this information a bit more readily available through some sort of magnetic leaderboard similar to the one shown here.

Magnetic Leaderboard

I would be able to write the game name and player name on each of the magnetic pieces and update them 'real-time' as new high scores were achieved.  I also thought this would be the perfect addition to my game room to foster the spirit of competition when people saw that their name has been removed from the list.

Beer Menu

My ideas was coming along nicely when it quickly escalated to a more hi-tech solution (at least I thought it was hi-tech; more about that in a moment).  I figured that I could get ahold of a relatively inexpensive LCD monitor and mount it vertically and digitally display the data similar to what I have seen at my local pub for displaying their beer selection.  I could power it using a Raspberry Pi Zero and have a simple 'slide show' that would cycle through static images that I could maintain via Photoshop (remember from my previous posts that I have gotten pretty adept with Photoshop by now).

The only down-side to this plan is that I would not be able to update the leaderboard in real-time since they would be static images that would need to be edited in Photoshop then uploaded to the Pi.

Remember my techie daughter that I mentioned in earlier sections?  Well it turns out that she and her equally techie husband were going to be in-town and staying with us so after they arrived I mentioned my plan to them.  Since he is a software engineer he decided to up the ante a bit and started concocting a plan for a more hi-tech solution that I could not have done on my own.

A few hours later, I had a real-time leaderboard that I can access via my mobile phone and update real-time.  He didn't stop there... he placed it on a server so it can be accessed remotely, I think mostly so he can update his high scores as well when playing on his own machine that he is building.

All-in-all this has been a great addition to my game room and is starting to get the desired result of a little competition.  I'm seeing my name on there too much which is only a result of the fact that my son and I have played the most during the setup and testing of the games.  I'm looking forward to getting bumped off so I can regain my titles legitimately!

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Continue to Summary

Intro | The Games | Control Panel Configuration | The Controls | Control Panel Lights | Research | Specific Games | Hardware & Software | Game Configurations | Cabinet Build | Artwork | Bonus | Leaderboard | Summary