Retro Bartop Arcade Station

This is the second sequel to the project that I did over the winter break. This time, I decided to build a Retro Bartop Arcade Station.

Why?

During the winter break, I had a sudden urge to play one of those classic old ROM type games that I use to play when I was young. I thought - there must be a way to play these games online. Luckily, there was and after playing few games, I thought why not make this experience more real?

Process

Building a Bartop Arcade Station was rather simpler than I expected, though there were times where it required patience on my end to build one. First step was physically building a hardware for the station.

The method that I used to create the hardware was physically cutting out the shapes for the station and also use laser cutter for detailed / precision cuts. Luckily, I had laser cutting facility available for me at school so I was able to access it without big issue.

One unfortunate event was that the material that I used for the station was slightly bigger than the recommended thickness that the school laser cutter offered. So there were few parts of the pieces that did not fully cut after the laser cut process. I had to manually cut them off.

After getting all the pieces for the station, now it was time for assembling them together. This was my favorite part.

Once I was done with assembling and glueing all the pieces together, I went on to paint and decorate the station. This was a fun part too, but a part which required some patience as well (waiting for all the paints to dry).

After the paint job was done, it was now time for simple decorations and adding some final touches. At this stage, I was pretty much done with most part.

Now, the final steps: it was just wiring up all the necessary equipments (e.g. - TV and speakers etc) and with the controllers and main machine. I used Raspberry Pi to mount the game software.

Voilà! After assembling all the wires and necessary equipment, I am finally done in making the Bartop Arcade Station!

Making this was super fun - I had lots of suggestion in selling this, but for now I want to keep it to myself. After all, I decided to make this so that I can play some old school cool games 👾