2 player bartop arcade cabinet plans plus#

Overall, I'm super-happy with how my bartop arcade turned out - it's not perfect, but it was a lot of fun building it, and I'm feeling pretty proud of it! People that have seen it so far have all asked 'where did you order it from?' - despite that fact I say 'oh look what I built'.so I guess thats a good sign :) Mostly used the kitchen table as a workbench to start building the cabinet (wife was away, hopefully she doesn't read this), until it got to sanding, painting and the messy stuff! I managed to borrow two bar clamps and a cordless jigsaw from a friend, and that was it. Some of these things were easy enough to accomodate, and some gave me a few headaches along the way - particularly the monitor being larger/more upright than 'normal', the front-facing amplifier and the deeper control panel - although my bartop build was mostly based on Degenatron's updated Weecade plans, most of the above broke bits of it dimensionally (couldn't use the normal speaker panel for example) so I had to do a lot of head scratching as I went.ДЄs above, I have a pretty limited inventory of tools outside of the basic cordless drill, Dremel, sander, screwdrivers etc.

Additional (easily accessible) usb connectors for usb joypads, other usb stuff.Single cablegoing into the cabinet with an outside 'global' on/off switch.Wanted to have front-facing amplifier access for volume control (kids).Didn't want to do a traditional lit marquee, or deal with acrylic/plexiglass.Lockable rear access door, removable not hinged.

2 player bartop arcade cabinet plans plus#

Painted finish rather than vinyl (cost/time, plus i like plain/solid colour).Deeper control panel to accomodate admin buttons all on one panel.The monitor needed to sit more upright than most bartops I saw (better for the kids).I wanted to use a decent (20-24') sized widescreen monitor (sorry retro gaming purists), as the bartop will also run Kodi for movies/music/Youtube.I also wanted to do a few things differently to most of the kits and other bartop's I'd seen. Most bartop kits are sold in the US, UK and Europe so shipping and the sucky Canadian dollar knocked out buying a kit so I hunted the internet and found the Degenatron-modified Weecade plans, which seemed pretty good and what most bartop's are likely based around anyway. So I started looking around for ready-cut bartop cabinet kits, thinking it'd be way easier and cheaper than building my own, but I didn't really find much - either I didn't love the shape of it, or it was impossibe or prohibitive cost-wise to get it to Canada. Heck, I didn't even get around to building a workbench in my garage. We live in Canada, and while I have a few basic tools/workspace, I don't have stuff like chopsaws, sash clamps, routers, bench drill, or even a jigsaw for that matter. Initially, I was thinking about building a 1-player bartop arcade with a small screen like RetroBuiltGames does - but then we have 2 very young boys who want everything the other had, so I figured I'd better go big and do a proper 2 player system.

And reading, reading, reading and finding elements of builds I liked. Reading more, I saw a lot of people were making their very own awesome bartop arcade machines. As part of reading up on Kodi, I happened across a few posts in Facebook groups talking about Retro Pie and started discovering a whole retro-gaming world!Д«eing a 70's/80's kid who grew up with a lot of the old 'classic' consoles and arcade games (miss-spent childhood), the idea of a retro game system immediately appealed to me. Here's the 'why' and what I wanted to achieve with my bartop arcade build.ДЇirst up, why? Well, I started getting into building Kodi-powered Raspberry Pi streaming boxes over a year ago, and was looking for other cool ideas for projects.