Painfully Obvious.

A while back you might remember that I was about to tell you how to synchronize the on/off states of your Pi, your monitor, and your marquee light. It involved an Arduino wired to two relay modules, which themselves were wired to an outlet of my own construction. I stopped…

You might have noticed that your list of installed games looks a bit bland in EmulationStation without artwork, game descriptions, and the like. You could use the metadata scraper that comes with RetroPie, but for MAME games I think it’s better to leverage the pedantry of the community and fill your game lists with more reliable metadata.

For the moment I’m out of hardware topics, so let’s look at some stuff that might be more widely applicable to folks who don’t make my exact hardware choices. In a minute I’ll show you a script I wrote for testing input. But first… Quitting EmulationStation I usually don’t have…

As we open Part 8 of this series, it will have become clear to most readers that I swung for the fences on this project. The two ServoStiks I purchased prove the point: they can switch between 4‐way control and 8‐way control. Did I need this? No. Was I going…

Man, has this series been neglected! I was going to tell you folks how I synchronized the power states of my Pi, marquee light, and monitor with an Arduino, but it turns out it’s hard to write Arduino tutorials when you’re only barely certain of what you’re doing, electronics‐wise, and…

Like last time, today we’ll be covering a topic that will be useful to Pi users in general, not just those who’ve built arcade cabinets: how to use a rotary encoder to control your Pi’s system volume. The problem Though I’m quite satisfied with the speakers I got, they don’t…

Now to the fun part. The rest of this series will cover the customizations I’ve made to my arcade cabinet. They’re not completely new ideas, but they’re things that I myself wish I’d been able to find guides for before I dove into the deep end. Let’s start with something…

Here’s my dilemma: I want to give enough detail to make this series worth reading, but not so much detail that it gets mistaken for a step‐by‐step tutorial. After all, I’m largely following other people’s plans here, and if I wanted to do a tutorial I should’ve taken twice as…

Before your attention flags, I want to wrap up the hardware portion of this series and move into the software. But first I need to cover some odds and ends.

Last time I told you a story of how I built an arcade cabinet out of a couple sheets of MDF. The part I left out was the making of the control panel — the MDF board that will hold the buttons, joysticks, and other controls.