Back to the Arcade - Part 7 - Hardware & Software

11/26/2019

My chosen hardware for this project is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ which has become the heart of my system. Like I mentioned earlier, I was originally thinking about using an old PC or laptop for this project but since I was able to [unintentionally] stall for nearly 20 years the technology changed and I decided, with a little coaxing from my daughter, to go with the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi 3B+

What is a Raspberry Pi? It is a small (about the size of a pack of cigarettes) computer that runs open source Linux operating systems. And best of all it is only $35. Add a few more $$ for a case, power supply, and maybe a heat sink and fan and you may hit $60. Not bad for a computer that will power a complete vintage arcade machine running hundreds of games. Not to mention that the entire operating system, configuration files, and hundreds of games are kept on a Micro-SD card (puts shame to the microfilm from the old James Bond films of the 60’s/70’s). But I digress.

Raspberry Pi Zero W

Side Note: if you want to build a mini-system the Raspberry Pi comes in another flavor; the Pi Zero ($5) or you can splurge and get the Pi Zero W (the W stands for wireless) for $10. Take a look at my blog post, Mini AtariPi to get an idea what I did in this arena.

The operating system of choice for vintage gaming is Retropie, which is what I am using. Because of the open source nature of this system, I was able to do some custom configuration of my project. I am not a coder, and definitely didn’t know a thing about coding in Linux when I started this project but fortunately it builds on the BASIC programming that I learned back in high school almost 35 years earlier. So with a little help (ok, a LOT of help) from Google, and some reverse engineering I have been able to muddle through it and figure things out. Fortunately there are quite a few people building vintage arcade systems and I was able to tap into that community. One of the best resources for me has been the Retropie Forum where you can find me as DRB.

I talked about controls in an earlier chapter, and how I came to the configuration I chose but this may be a good place to talk about the software side of it. One thing I have noticed about many of the posts on the internet is that it appears that most of the vintage system builders are building systems a bit later than mine. Many of them focus on the fighting games that came later in the 80’s and into the 90’s as well as more Nintendo and Sega systems. Due to my impressionable years being late 70’s to early 80’s, my drive was to build a system with the games from that era which makes me more of an Atari guy I guess.

The fighting games dominantly use a joystick/6-button combination which can be used for many of the classic games that I like as well, but the games I targeted also used trackballs and spinners. Due to this, I had to choose an emulator that would best accommodate the trackball/spinner games. A little research revealed that I would dominantly be using AdvanceMAME.

Now that I brought it up, I’ll take a minute to talk about MAME. MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is what makes all of this possible in the first place. MAME is a project developed to preserve the history of vintage video games and how I got involved in this whole project many, many years ago. I won’t go into all the details here, but you can click on the link above to learn more about the MAME project.

Another thing to note is that I am not limited to AdvanceMAME, I can use different emulators as needed for my games, but as I mentioned AdvanceMAME is the best at handling the trackball/spinner games so most of my games run on this system which uses ROMset version 106.

The MAME project facilitates updating the ROMsets and there are multiple ROMsets available and must be matched to the emulator in order to run properly. If you want to learn more about ROMsets and the different versions, refer to the official MAME site, and the link above as I am not qualified enough to get into that much detail here.

It is also worth noting that Retropie is limited to certain emulators which are matched with particular ROMsets and are listed at https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/MAME. So, if you are considering using a Raspberry Pi for your project ensure that the games you want to play are available as ROMsets that work with RPi.

If you want to know if a particular game will run on AdvanceMAME version 106 feel free to leave a question here or contact me directly and I will do my best to answer, but please do not ask me where to get ROMs.

Continue to Part 8 - Game Configurations

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Dan Blanchard

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