RGBCommander Update (and possible fix)

If you have recently been working on your own arcade and ran across posts referencing a utility for RetroPie called RGBCommander that can control the LEDs on your RGB-enabled controls, you have probably also discovered that the original site is now gone and the original author is no longer supporting the great add-on.  Well, I might have a little good news.

List of primary parts used in the Arcade Build

I have numerous request from both this blog and my recent YouTube series on the arcade build regarding particular parts I used, dimensions of lumber, etc.  While some of this is covered in the various articles of the blog, I thought I'd try to gather everything together in one easy-to-reference article.

The Arcade Build - Three Years Later

 

So, it's been almost three years since I completed the build of my first arcade machine.  How is the machine holding up?  Have there been any updates? Does it get any real use?  I thought that since I hadn't posted anything on this blog in quite some time, I'd give a quick update regarding the cabinet today.

Cost/Feature Comparison of Home Built vs. Retail Arcade Cabinets

Many folks have asked me about the cost of building my arcade and why didn't I just buy one of the retail options.  For those reasons, I decided to check out a couple of local retail establishments and the machines they offered and the features they had.  Here are the results:

Retail Option #1

• Arcade Games: 412
• Total Games: 412
• 26" monitor
• 1 LED joystick 
• 3 LED buttons
• Small (~2") LED trackball
• External volume control
• Coin operated
• Under cabinet LED lighting

PRICE:  $2,999

Retail Option #2

• Arcade Games: 130
• Total Games: 130
• 25" monitor
• 2 joysticks
• 6 buttons per player
• 3" trackball
• Coin operated

PRICE: $2,995

Home Built Arcade

• 408 Arcade Games
• >3,700 Total Games
• 27" monitor
• 2 programmable 4-way/8-way joysticks
• 6 LED buttons per player
• 2 dedicated LED pinball buttons
• 4 dedicated LED administrator buttons
• 3" LED trackball
• Spinner
• Full LED animation / attract mode
• External volume control /stereo sound
• Coin operated
• Under cabinet LED lighting
• Full end-user addition/removal of games

PRICE: Approx. $1,500*

*My cost is approximate.  I tried to keep track, but I had to purchase tools and other items in quantities over what I needed.  If I were to build an identical second machine, I could probably build it in the $1,200-$1,300 range.

But as you can see, the home-built version has many more features, games and expandability over the retail versions.  Of course, you have to supply the labor and possibly the time invested to learning, but in the end, I feel the home-built option is far and away better than the retail version at less than half the cost.

Creating Custom RGB Animation Files

If you are using RetroPie, Ultimarc's Ultimate I/O encoder with RGBCommander and would like to look at a way to build your own animation (.rgba) files for attract mode or for each individual emulator, take a look at the following post:

RGBCommander and Custom Animations

Thanks to Gijs, author of RGBCommander, for his help in understanding how the animation files work with his code.

The Arcade Build is Complete!

After four months of planning, building, programming, configuring and testing, my Journey to a Home Arcade is finally complete!  What started as a Christmas gift of a Raspberry Pi from my wonderful co-workers has now become this:

You can see the final parts of the build and how it came together in Arcade Build - Part III. But if you just want to see an abridged photo version with some videos of the arcade in action, see the page:
Complete Arcade Build - Abridged Version in Photos + videos!

Again, a huge thanks to those that have gone before, and shared their own journey on YouTube, web sites and via forums and bulletin boards.  I hope my own journey here might help someone starting down this road on their first home retro-arcade.

The Arcade Build Begins (Finally!)

After months of designing, planning and gathering of parts, the actual arcade cabinet build finally begins!  Part one will cover the basic cabinet construction and be updated in the corresponding page after each day's work is completed.  This, along with all the other planning, designing and other background information can be found in the listed pages.

Here we go....

The Arcade Build - Part 1: Cabinet Construction
The Arcade Build - Part 2: Priming, Painting and Plexiglass
The Arcade Build - Part 3: Internal Wiring and Control Panel

One man's journey to building a retro-arcade

This is my personal journey, with help from a lot of other smarter folks, to building a home, retro-arcade machine.  It's also my first attempt at blogging.  

The actual build of the cabinet will commence in mid-March and I'll do my best to update this site on a routine basis.  Until then, the pages listed shows all the planning and testing up to this point.

I do not claim to be an expert at anything posted here (including writing), and there is a lot of additional information out there on the web.  But maybe someone contemplating tackling a project like this will find a tidbit or two of helpful information.