Arcade1up Adding Games
Awilda
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Have you purchased an Arcade1Up and wished you could play more games than the 2-4 games that came on it? You can, by replacing most of the electronics with a Raspberry Pi! You could also use an old PC that you might already have sitting around gathering dust which actually performs better and can emulate more systems, but a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie is a simple low power solution, and you can rely on the experiences of others that have already figured out how to set this up to be extremely user friendly. If you do go the PC route, I recommend taking a look at the Hyperspin or LaunchBox/BigBox front end for MAME. However for this article, I will cover using Raspberry Pi and RetroPie.
Most of the information for modifying the hardware is in YouTube, posted by ETA Prime. Use this guide to help you understand the steps needed. I am also coving some topics for adjusting the software settings that ETA Prime does not cover in this video which I needed to tweak, and some gotchas that I ran into
Not all Arcade1Up machines are ideal for all mods. There are two different screen orientations, portrait and landscape. In most cases you would want to use a landscape cabinet so that you can maximize the screen space. In addition, if you don't want to buy or build a completely custom control deck and drill your own holes, potentially messing up the original artwork and plexiglass, you will want either the Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat II, or Marvel cabinet which all contain a joystick and 6 buttons each for 2 players. Vertical cabinets would look nice for vertical games such as Pac Man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Q-Bert, but any landscape games would be fairly small, and of course the lack of buttons on the vertical cabs can be limiting.
Even with a SF2/MK2/Marvel machine, you will likely need at least two additional buttons for the coin buttons, but those could be added on the front panel without risking damage to the plexiglass cover.
Unscrew the metal box on the back of the LCD and disconnect the cables and unscrew the ground wire. Screw the ground into the corner of the HDMI board and reconnect the cables to it. Find a good spot to secure the board to avoid stress on the wires. On my machine, the cables were very short, so I ended up adding a shelf in the inside to mount this to. Avoid having this board making direct contact to the metal housing of monitor. The original 12v power adapter will connect to this new board to power the screen. You can connect any HDMI device that is handy at this point to test that the screen shows a picture.
The original joysticks have connectors that do not match the connectors on the USB controller boards, so unless you want to splice and reconnect new ends on these, just use new joysticks, which are typically better quality. On my machine a wire for the left position of the player 1 joystick was disconnected anyway. Removing these can be tricky because on some cabinets they used glue in addition to screwing them in. So even after removing the screws you will need to break free from the bond of the glue. I had to use a screwdriver to bang on the end and apply enough force to pop it off the bottom. It actually tore off some of the underside of the deck. No ones sees this side anyway, so it is ok.
Align and mark your positions for the new joysticks by flipping it over and lining up with the center of the hole. Then drill small pilot holes for new holes to screw the joysticks in. Be careful not to drill too deep and come out the other side of your deck. Also be careful to not mount your joysticks upside down. I did this originally, and while I could map them fine in Emulation Station and most games, the RetroPie setup menus forced me to use them backwards and also I could not remap them correctly for Dragon's Lair. It is not a problem if you do, you can just unscrew them later and rotate them, reconnect them, and remap them. Once you have identified the proper orientation of your joystick I recommend marking the top with a sharpie so you don't make that mistake again.
If you want to add more buttons, drill 30mm holes to add them. The front panel may be a good place for a coin button to avoid messing up your control board and plexiglass. I used a step bit to drill these holes. You can postpone this decision until later while you set up the rest of your mod.
Now disconnect the button and joystick wires from the unneeded interface board (which you can remove to give you more space) and plug all the wires into the 2 USB controller boards. Connect the same buttons to the same ports on each USB board or you might run into trouble with button mapping. You can use 3M command strips or plastic feet to attach to the USB encoders to the underside of the control deck. They won't hurt anything if they dangle. Connect the USB wires to your Pi. You may need a USB keyboard to help with the software setup. It is a good idea to have one plugged in the first time you configure your joysticks, because adding another USB device later may cause your joysticks to be in a different order (which can be resolved by swapping the ports and re-plugging them in). For this reason I recommend plugging it in before your first boot.
If you have a button kit with LED buttons, you will either have a daily chain wire (old style) to supply power to all the buttons or each button will have a 3 wire connector (new style). If you have the daisy chain type, tape the extra connectors with electrical tape to keep them from touching each other. If they touch, they can cause the LEDs to not light up. This will connect to one of the red ports on the USB board for power. I prefer the daisy chain style because it gives you more flexibility on button placement with longer wires. You can use some of the original Arcade1Up wiring for the input wires this way and many of those have longer wires. If needed, you can splice the input wires to combine them and add length. These LED buttons can supply power even if your computer is off. If you want them to turn off completely when not in use, you will need to turn off the power strip altogether or wire up your own switch for them. On the Pi, they do turn off when the Pi is shutdown.
There are some pre-built images out there that you can download and install that may have many of the following procedures done for you. The drawback to using a prebuilt image is you may not like they way they set things up, since many were configured for widescreen monitors and added digital bezels, and some added fancy menus that make it difficult to find the games you want. The rest of these steps are assuming you starting from a stock RetroPie image.
Download the Retropie image and one of the recommended tools such as Etcher to flash your micro SD card. It will take a few minutes of time to flash the image with Etcher. Once complete you will not be able to view the filesystem on your computer, this is normal. Remove the card and insert it into your Pi and connect the power. If your screen is connected correctly, you will see the Pi boot sequence and it will launch Emulation Station.
If you are modding a cabinet with a vertical screen, such as Space Invaders, Pac Man, or Galaga, your screen is mounted vertically and RetroPie will be showing sideways. You will have to deal with this for a bit to map your buttons, then we can exit Emulation Station and fix this with a keyboard.
The first time your RetroPie will boot, you will be asked to configure your USB joysticks and buttons. These buttons just apply for Emulation Station and don't necessarily configure your buttons the way you want them for MAME games. If you try to skip this step it will cause issues, so map them now and remap them later if you change your layout. We also need to get past this step to enable SSH or Samba to transfer ROM images. It will likely ask for more buttons than you have, just hold a button to skip the unneeded ones. The last button is the hotkey button, which you will need to use in combination with start to exit games.
Choose a button that is logical for the coin in button and assign this as the select button. RetroArch will use this as the coin in button in MAME. If you added new coin buttons, use those. If not, you can pick existing buttons and leave off one of the original buttons like the MK3 Run button for now and revisit adding more buttons later as you figure out what you will need. Make sure you configure the buttons the same on each controller, some have reported this causing issues if you do not.
Then hit control-x and save. Now type reboot and enter, and life will be much easier. If you do not have a keyboard available you can connect to your Pi remotely with SSH and do it that way, but it will make you turn your head sideways when setting up your WiFi and SSH.
Enabling SSH will allow you to connect to your Pi using SFTP. SFTP is a quick method of transferring many games to your Pi with a tool such as Filezilla. Another option is to configure Samba to allow you to browse the filesystem as a Windows network share. Another benefit to enabling SSH is that you can remotely open a terminal window to your RetroPie and manage Roms and run commands without dragging out your USB keyboard, using the default username of pi and password of raspberry.
First we need to connect to the WiFi. Select the RetroPie option from Emulation Station, then select WiFi, then Connect to to WiFi Network, select your WiFi and enter the passcode. Then from the RetroPie menu, select Show IP to confirm you are connected and see the IP address.
If you are an emulation fan, you likely already have a collection of these. If not, use a Google search to help you locate them. Arcade games use MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator), which works best if you have a ROM set that matches the version of MAME. The default MAME version for RetroPie is lr-mame2003, which uses romset 0.78. However you can install multiple versions of MAME (2003, 2010, 2015, 2016, and other builds like FinalBurn Alpha and Advanced MAME), and you can select the version that works best for each rom. Newer versions of MAME have more compatibility with more games, but may run slower. So typically I select the oldest version of MAME that can successfully launch each game. RetroPie also emulates many home consoles, from Atari 2600 to NES to Genesis to SNES to Playstation, and many more in between. Locate the ROM images for any of these systems you are interested in playing on this cabinet as well. Some systems will require BIOS rom files in order to work (like Sega CD and 3DO). Systems that do not work very well on the Pi are the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Dreamcast, or anything newer than these. Also arcade ROMs with a lot of fast moving background images like driving games do not work well (including Outrun), and neither do most 3D games with lots of polygons.
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