- The monitor measures at 24 inches and the computer is a raspberry pi running a retropie which. 150 free woodworking plans get diy arcade cabinet raspberry pi: The pacade bartop arcade the pacade bartop arcade was created to resemble a very iconic bartop arcade found in many bars and casinos in the late 1970’s.
- 2-Player Bartop Arcade Machine (Powered by Pi): The 'Galactic Starcade' is a DIY retro bartop arcade cabinet for two players. It is powered by the Raspberry Pi micro-computer and plays multiple types of retro games - primarily NES, SNES, Megadrive and arcade (MAME) games.
Geek pub bartop arcade plans pdf I used a refurbished 19' 4:3 LCD TFT monitor I found online pretty cheap. 19' is perfect for a cabinet of this size, but its hard to find anything to buy new as nobody manufactures 4:3 aspect ratio monitors anymore.
Here's the 'why' and what I wanted to achieve with my bartop arcade build.
First 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. 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!
Being 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. Reading more, I saw a lot of people were making their very own awesome bartop arcade machines. So I started thinking. And Planning. And ordering parts gradually. And reading, reading, reading and finding elements of builds I liked.
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. 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. Heck, I didn't even get around to building a workbench in my garage.
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. 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.
I also wanted to do a few things differently to most of the kits and other bartop's I'd seen. Specifically:
- 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
- The monitor needed to sit more upright than most bartops I saw (better for the kids)
- Deeper control panel to accomodate admin buttons all on one panel
- I didn't want to do t-moulding
- Painted finish rather than vinyl (cost/time, plus i like plain/solid colour)
- Lockable rear access door, removable not hinged
- Didn't want to do a traditional lit marquee, or deal with acrylic/plexiglass
- Wanted to have front-facing amplifier access for volume control (kids)
- Single cablegoing into the cabinet with an outside 'global' on/off switch
- Additional (easily accessible) usb connectors for usb joypads, other usb stuff
Bartop Arcade Cabinet Plans Pdf
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.
As above, I have a pretty limited inventory of tools outside of the basic cordless drill, Dremel, sander, screwdrivers etc. I managed to borrow two bar clamps and a cordless jigsaw from a friend, and that was it. 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!
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 :)
Notes: I followed the Degenatron modified Weecade plans exactly - the only things I did different to the plan was my cabinet was 201/8' wide (width of my widescreen monitor), and my control panel was 83/4' deep (to accomodate all admin & player buttons). For button layout I used a template from Slagcoin and modded it, more on that (and my pdf template) in Step 3.
The bartop arcade build took me just over a week from start to finish, working pretty much 10 hour days on it altogether and probably cost around $300-$400 (CAD) in total. I'll itemise the parts used and add it up later in this writeup. Why bother doing this writeup anyway? I figured putting all the information and useful stuff I found along the way could help other people, and I wanted a place to post up pics and stuff to keep everything in one place neatly and tidily :)
Bartop Arcade Cabinet Plans Pdf
In the next section, I'll start writing up each stage of building my bartop arcade so scroll on down for the first steps.