The post The Dreamcade Replay running on the Legends Ultimate Home Arcade appeared first on Armchair Arcade.

Today we are releasing our firmware update 3.0.11* which includes:

• Online multi-player ArcadeNet games
• Hi-score Leaderboard for BurgerTime
• Visual improvements for all vector games
• Enabled Save/Load/Rewind on the following games: Desert War, Gratia, Liberator, Psychic 5, Avalanche
• BYOG time no longer ticks during Local Streaming session

For more information on our updates please see here: https://www.atgames.net/arcades/release-notes/

* For those adventurous gamers, we also have an Open Beta for you to try which introduces limited Bluetooth (BT) Support for Raspberry Pi.

The post AtGames Legends Ultimate home arcade update 3.0.11 – Online multiplayer, hi-score Leaderboard, Bluetooth with Raspberry Pi, etc. appeared first on Armchair Arcade.

Here’s the link!

More awesome ebooks for you. We’ve teamed up with Packt for our newest bundle! Get ebooks like Learn Raspberry Pi, Hands-On IoT Solutions with Blockchain, Internet of Things with Python and Raspberry Pi, Python Robotics Projects, ROS Robotics Projects, and Internet of Things for Architects. Plus, your purchase will support a charity of your choice!

Check out the Key Internet Statistics in 2019!

Pay $1 or more. Normally, the total cost for the ebooks in this bundle is as much as $1,513. Here at Humble Bundle, you choose the price and increase your contribution to upgrade your bundle! This bundle has a minimum $1 purchase.

Read them anywhere. The ebooks in this bundle are available in PDF, MOBI, and ePub formats, so they work on your computer, e-readers, iPads, cell phones, and a wide array of mobile devices! Instructions and a list of recommended reading programs can be found here.

Support charity. Choose where the money goes – between the publisher and a charity of your choice via the PayPal Giving Fund. If you like what we do, you can leave us a Humble Tip too!

The Humble Book Bundle: Robotics & IoT by Packt

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Here’s the link. Offer expires 2018-03-28 11:00:00 PDT.

More awesome ebooks for you. We’ve teamed up with Wiley for our newest bundle! Get titles like Learning Python with Raspberry Pi, Electronics For Dummies, and Complete Electronics Self-Teaching Guide with Projects. Plus, your purchase will support Innocent Lives Foundation – or a charity of your choice!

Pay what you want. All together, these ebooks would cost over $414. Here at Humble Bundle, you choose the price and increase your contribution to upgrade your bundle! This bundle has a minimum $1 purchase.

Read them anywhere. These books are available in PDF, ePUB, and MOBI formats, meaning you can read them anywhere at any time. Instructions and a list of recommended reading programs can be found here.

Support charity. Choose where the money goes – between the publisher, Innocent Lives Foundation, and, if you’d like, a charity of your choice via the PayPal Giving Fund. If you like what we do, you can leave us a Humble Tip too!

The Humble Book Bundle: DIY Electronics by Wiley

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The Humble Book Bundle: LEGO MINDSTORMS & Robotics presented by Apress

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As we left off, I was going to hook up the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and get RetroPie on a microSD card and go from there. For those following along, I’ll be mostly trying the directions here, here, and especially here.

Hooking it all up.

I plugged the Raspberry Pi into the Picade’s USB, audio, and HDMI outputs. I then plugged the power into both the Picade and Rasberry Pi. I also plugged the Phantom Lapboard‘s dongle into another USB port on the Raspberry Pi in order to use its mouse and keyboard for setup.

Now, it’s time to power it all on and see how I did.

And… it didn’t detect the Pi. I troubleshot the issue by bringing out another monitor with a different HDMI cable. I got a signal on that. So I used that other HDMI cable to connect to the Picade, which did work. I then put the included short HDMI cable back in, making sure it was pushed in better on both ends.

By some miracle, all of my wiring worked.

Now I just had to follow the RetroPie prompts to set up my control panel.

The display is quite nice.

I went into the RetroPie setup and configured the audio to go through the headphone jack. Both speakers work fine, but there is a low level hiss, which is apparently common with sound through the Pi’s headphone jack. When there’s sound, it’s not that noticeable, but it is something I’ll have to figure out how to adjust at some point.

There’s not much pre-installed other than the emulators on RetroPie (this is of course using the EmulationStation front end), but it does have a small selection of “ports” and other games that aren’t particularly interesting to me in this type of arcade-style setup.

EmulationStation is the front end.

Included Ports, short and sweet.

Duke Nukem 3D is cool, but not something I really want to play on this type of setup.

That was good enough for testing, but I really want this mostly for arcade games.

I had to first create a retropie directory on a USB stick and then put it in the Pi. Once it finished blinking, I had to take it to my desktop computer and put the appropriate ROM files in the newly created directories for what looked like a really nice range of emulators. I started out with personal favorites, Pooyan and Satan’s Hollow, I threw the Super NES version of Donkey Kong Country on there for good measure.

I pressed F4 on my keyboard and let it reboot itself. Sure enough, I got a Super Nintendo emulator to appear, as I did the three different versions of MAME that it supports (I copied the two ROM files to each MAME directory, not being sure which version was going to perform best).

There are three MAME options.

Selecting what to play.

Of course I’m going to test with Pooyan.

So obviously that works fine, although I do want to remove image stretching on MAME. I’d much rather have a smaller visible screen and the games the correct aspect ratio. Unfortunately, that’s one of the tricky things about this Picade setup. There is no dedicated Escape or other, similar, key, so I’m kind of flying blind without also using a USB keyboard (luckily I have one hooked up; I guess I’ll dedicate the Phantom Lapboard to this system since it has a dongle that seems to work for both its keyboard and mouse). Even with the USB keyboard, I wasn’t able to figure out how to exit out of MAME.

Upon rebooting, I selected the third MAME version, and sure enough, that one displays the screen the way that I want it. The right pinball button on my cabinet even allowed me to exit back to the master RetroPie menu!

Pooyan the way it’s supposed to look.

The first MAME option works well too, although like the third MAME is a bit heavy on the graphics filtering.

Satan’s Hollow puts the sound on this system through its paces.

In any case, the controls are pretty responsive and I have no major complaints with the emulation, as you’d expect from the latest, most powerful Raspberry Pi available at the moment. As is usual with these things, the setup is going to be a long process. With that said, I’m happy that it works and I’ll be of course be setting up a few key titles to be sure to play.

Unfortunately, there’s no dedicated on/off switch for the Pi, as the on/off switch on the side of the arcade cabinet only turns the monitor on or off. I can however do that from the software controls, so it’s not too bad, but I’d still like a dedicated switch.

Since everything was working, I decided one last time to try and figure out the issue with the marquee. I took it off, and sure enough, there was still a plastic protector on each piece of the plexiglass. I don’t know how I missed that. The good news is, now it really does look the way it’s supposed to.

The marquee is fixed!

So now the only thing left is to properly mount the Raspberry Pi on the back of the door. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure a satisfactory way of doing that with the included holes and screws, so if I can find ones that fit, I’m just going to order PCB Mounting Adhesive Standoffs and place it roughly where I have it now.

It really should be mounted on the door, but it’s easier this way.

Actually, after I wrote that, I did find one adhesive standoff in the leftover Picade parts, so I used that to secure the Raspberry Pi to the bottom of the cabinet. It seems to work well and just having the one allows me to manipulate the PCB when necessary.

It would have been nice if both the Raspberry Pi and Picade could be powered together, rather than separately. That will have to be something to look into for the future.

So, to sum up, if you have sufficient patience, this is a relatively easy build. There were several areas where I struggled mightily, but it was obviously never anything insurmountable. While I would have preferred a fully pre-configured SD card dedicated to MAME, the available RetroPie image gets most of the job done. With the marquee issue resolved, my only real beef is with the sound output. When there’s something playing, it sounds fine and you can set it in software to be quite loud. However, the audible hiss when nothing is happening is not that nice. I’m not sure if I’m ever going to bother fixing that, however.

Interestingly, just like before, after I wrote that, I decided to investigate a possible fix for the audio hiss. The answer was found here. Editing the config.txt file (just like the days of MS-DOS for me), I added the line disable_audio_dither=1 to the end of the file. It fixed the issue. There might still be some minor hissing when certain sounds are actually playing, but not when it isn’t playing, which is what really matters.

I also don’t like the idea that I have to set the volume level via software. I’d much rather have a dedicated dial or buttons. The side buttons on the monitor (that pass through the case side nicely) control the volume, but I’m not using the monitor for sound. If possible, I may try to figure a way to use the case speakers like I do now, but have it be controlled via those buttons. Who knows, though?

My long-term goal is to perfect a MAME setup on this. I casually installed a few more MAME game ROMS, and some worked, while others didn’t (and I also have to figure out how to install sound samples, since I assume that’s not an automated process; at least there’s no specific folder, so it may require some copying somehow using the File Manager). I’m going to experiment with the other version of MAME (the other one that defaults to the correct aspect ratio) and see if that improves things, as well as look for a full ROM set (although I’m not really sure I want to wade through a whole lot of cruft, so I may just install on demand). I also would like to figure out how to disable display of some of the other emulators on there, at least until I decide to make use of them. Again, time will tell. Anyway, for now, I’m pretty happy with how this went and will certainly consider similar time consuming, but gratifying projects in the future.

Read the rest of the series:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

The post Building the Picade Mini Arcade Cabinet: Part 04 appeared first on Armchair Arcade.

As we left off, I was getting ready to work on the wiring loom…

I’m now tasked with wiring all of the buttons on the cabinet, as well as everything on the control panel. It’s relatively easy once you sort through all the wiring looms. You just have to have one ground for every active plug, and each section has two pins.

This is the PCB. I need to loosen all of the screws in order to insert the wires. It actually came with a small screwdriver, but I didn’t see it, so I used my own.

I struggled mightily getting the wires into the holes and locking the wires down. I ended up having to strip some to reveal additional wire for the ones that I damaged. I eventually figured out that if I slightly looped the end of the wire, I could get it to stay better. Hopefully this technique allows everything to work the way that it should.

In terms of difficulty and frustration on this project, I’d put this wiring at the top. As you can see, however, I did get it done finally.

It was difficult connecting the wiring from the control panel buttons to the PCB (I didn’t state it before, but everything goes to a specific place on the PCB), but I eventually got that as well. I also attached the speakers, referring to the manual to remember which was the left speaker and which was the right speaker. As stated earlier, the further I get in the manual, the less detail they seem to go into.

I used the included sticky tape and plastic bolts to secure the PCB. You can also screw it in, but that was too difficult.

Next, I secured the control panel. That involved screws and bolts and access from the rear panel.

Now I had to secure the LCD panel’s controls.

The LCD panel’s control panel lines up with the holes on the outside of the cabinet.

I then applied the sticky exterior buttons. It works really well.

I attached all of the remaining wires before connecting the CPU (in this case, a Raspberry Pi 2).

The next steps are going to be the big finish. I need to configure RetroPie on a microSD card, then insert that into my recently received Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. Then I hook everything up and see what works and what doesn’t (hopefully my wiring is OK). Of course, there’s going to be a lot of additional configuration with RetroPie and the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B in general. This part is definitely not going to be plug and play, and will likely rank highly on the frustration scale. Until next time…

Read the rest of the series:

Part One
Part Two
Part Four

The post Building the Picade Mini Arcade Cabinet: Part 03 appeared first on Armchair Arcade.

As we left off, I was getting ready to work on the control panel. As you’ll read, I took a brief detour first…

Although my plan was to start in on the next step in the process, the control panel, the rear access panel was bothering me. Although it worked, I was able to get only two of the four screws and bolts in and I had the swivel joints reversed, so they showed on the outside of the panel (it should have just been the screws that showed). As you can see from the photo, I was able to get it on the right way. I still could only fit two of the four screws and bolts, but I took out my drill and its smallest bit and drilled out a little extra room. Now all four screws and bolts fit and it’s secure. I had to adjust the locking clip a bit, but now it’s perfect. I wish I could do a similar fix for the cloudy marquee mystery, but this to me was more important.

It closes nicely.

The next step was to sandwich the control panel art (I chose the same style as the marquee) between the control panel plexiglass and wood backing. I was worried about this step after the marquee issue, but after peeling both sides of the plexiglass, it was nice and clear.

The finished product.

The next step was attaching the joystick. I just removed the ball top and plastic disc, then inserted it through the hole. I secured it with two of the longer screws.

The next was to attach the buttons. These popped in fairly easily.

The bottom of the completed control panel, prior to the wiring.

The remaining buttons in the kit went directly on the cabinet.

Next step, which will be covered in the the third entry, is the control panel and PCB wiring. That’s going to be quite the process, perhaps only second in frustration to attaching the rear door. We’ll see.

On a side note, even though I already have a Raspberry Pi Model B (it originally had another purpose), I decided to order a Model B+, which is faster and has more RAM. I also ordered a 32GB Class 10 MicroSD card to go in it (the older Model B board uses a full-sized SD card). While this added $50 to my build cost, I think it will be worth it in the end, providing all of the performance as a transportable emulation machine this should ever need. Hopefully it arrives by this Wednesday.

Read the rest of the series:

Part One
Part Three
Part Four

The post Building the Picade Mini Arcade Cabinet: Part 02 appeared first on Armchair Arcade.

This is part one of what will likely be a three or four part series, but ultimately, who knows at this point? In this (hopefully) short series, I’m going to visually document the build process and provide light commentary that’s mostly related to any issues I’ve run into.

The Picade is a mostly complete kit in your choice of two sizes of joystick-based mini-arcade cabinet. The only thing that’s missing is the brains to actually play the games. Typically, this is some version of the Raspberry Pi, which I plan on using (right now I have an original Raspberry Pi on hand, but if I get that working I’ll swap it out for the latest model), but the kit is also designed to accommodate any of a number of other inexpensive small form factor computing devices.

While there are video tutorials online, I’m mostly following the paper manual that’s included with the Picade because I have no way of knowing at this point what version of the kit someone else may have. In any case, in general, the included manual is well written and easy to follow, although there are some parts that could really benefit from more visuals or a better description (more on that later). So, without further ado, here I go:

These are all of the components from inside the shipping box.

I’m getting the components ready for the first part of the build, which is the base.

Attaching clips.

Attaching the rubber feet. This part you kind of wing with general guidelines from the manual.

Attaching one of the side panels. You always know what part faces the inside because it has text on it.

The other side panel and top panel.

Placing the monitor.

Choosing a marquee. I chose the one in the middle.

I removed the backing and sandwiched the marquee as indicated in the manual, but it’s hard to see. Clearly something is wrong here, but I don’t know what. It’s not something I want to bother with at this point.

Securing the speakers to the case.

This is where the manual failed me. The rear door is very difficult to know how to attach. I consulted a video that gave me a clue, but it still wasn’t quite enough to avoid re-doing this many times. Essentially, one part of the hinge goes on the outside and the other part of the hinge goes on the inside. I think on mine I have it reversed, so it probably doesn’t look as good as it’s supposed to. I can’t be sure, though. In any case, I was also only able to get two of the four screws and bolts in. It seems stable enough, so I’m leaving it. What a headache!

Attaching the clip that holds the rear access panel in place. It works well.

In the later photos, you’ll note fine black dust on the table cloth. That’s from repeated screwings of the door. The cabinet is powder coated well, but it does come off with abuse.

In part two, I’ll start in on the joystick control panel.

Read the rest of the series:

Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

The post Building the Picade Mini Arcade Cabinet: Part 01 appeared first on Armchair Arcade.