RCade: Building a Community Arcade Cabinet

RCade: Building a Community Arcade Cabinet(frankchiarulli.com)

89 points by evakhoury 86 days ago | 16 comments

It is cool but... I much prefer to go an emulate the real thing: if you are using a CRT anyway (2nd sentence in TFA says it's using a CRT), you may as well make the cab compatible with the good old arcade JAMMA standard, use a Pi2JAMMA adapter, and stick a Raspberry Pi into the cab.

As a bonus you can then buy old PCBs and switch between either your Pi or a real PCB.

It's also much simpler: no need for complicated controllers and whatnots for all the heavy lifting is done by the Pi2JAMMA adapter.

It's what I have: a real arcade cab (a vintage one, from the 80s) but "modernized" in that at any time I can switch between real PCBs (I've got both real vintage PCBs and vintage bootleg PCBs: a prized possession) and my Pi+Pi2JAMMA.

I take it anything that can be run in TFA can be run on a Pi: I'm not sure if that project does something that couldn't run from a Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter so maybe I'm misunderstanding the (cool and good looking) project.

The marquee that's a display that can change is nice: I've seen a few arcade cabs (on arcade cabs forums) that had these and they'd switch the picture depending on the game being played.

gregsadetsky 81 days ago | |

As noted in the article - and in the related article [0] by Stephen who goes in-depth into the development of the custom CRT display adapter - some of the constraints/wishes were: wanting to go beyond 18-bit color to avoid color banding, and also to have a generic USB interface so that the CRT could be driven by a laptop or any PC.

I also think that the people involved in this project enjoyed inventing/creating/coding just as much as they wanted to "get it done" - and so, there's definitely a healthy/heavy mix of "we took this existing thing" and "we invented this completely new way of doing things".

[0] https://www.scd31.com/posts/building-an-arcade-display-adapt...

dfxm12 81 days ago |

They also showed me the Wondercab, an open-source arcade cabinet design

Does anyone know what they mean by open-source arcade cabinet design? I went to the link expecting plans/instructions to build one, but there's nothing of the sort there. The RCade cabinet even appears to be based not on the Wondercab's design, but on the Taito Gameroom classics cabinet...

The link: https://www.deathbyaudioarcade.com/wondercab

mnky9800n 81 days ago |

This is awesome I’m currently sitting across from the RCade. Yay!

bsimpson 81 days ago | |

Is it available to the public? I'm in Brooklyn.

gregsadetsky 81 days ago | | |

it's mostly only accessible to folks who are part of the Recurse Center - but there are public events at Recurse such as https://luma.com/localhost-rcade -- which is a talk about the RCade..! (it seems to be waitlist-only at this point unfortunately)

michael_pica 82 days ago |

this is a really cool project. I also appreciate the work that went into retaining the original CRT, that's usually the first thing to go in other projects like this but it does so much to make it feel special and not just another computer in a box.

jryio 81 days ago |

¥¥¥

gregsadetsky 81 days ago | |

Coming here virtually/in person to confirm that even though it’s a bit rude to “rank” people, I basically struggle to understand how incredibly good Frank is - extraordinarily fast, deeply capable, and kind to a fault. A very uniquely, typical, amazing Recurser.

rishabhaiover 81 days ago | | |

I wholeheartedly agree. Glad to see his work on the front page.

peterept 81 days ago |

This is great.

But when I read the headline I was kind of hoping it might be a home arcade machine that also let me watch other people playing (ala’twitch) but then also allow me to join the game (or even take it over).

billyjobob 81 days ago |

The "hardware" section is really cool, and then you get to the "software" section and it's just webslop.

gregsadetsky 81 days ago | |

I think that it's very unfair to call the development of a CLI [0], TypeScript & Rust SDK's & starter examples [1], a desktop simulator, and a seamless deployment infrastructure, as "slop".

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/rcade

[1] https://github.com/fcjr/RCade

bsimpson 81 days ago |

Microsoft Edge has some interesting properties for this project:

- It's a fork of Chrome.

- It has a Linux build.

- It has a kiosk mode.

- It's probably not the browser that a Linux user would be using for things they care about, so it has no authenticated state.

It should be relatively simple to add Edge as a non-Steam game, with a kiosk session pointed at rcade.dev. That would allow people to add an rcade.dev tile to their SteamOS game library, and play any of the games on the platform.