arcadenostelgia
Beginner
We built this arcade box (below) from scratch in 2020, and my son decked it out with RGB lighting. It was a labour of love.
We built the hardware with a RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi (either 3 or 4) and Emulation Station. We picked up a cheap pack of joysticks and buttons and an XinMo2 board keyboard encoder which came with the starter pack.
After some painful wrangling and testing and wrangling, it worked for all the games that were working. There was something special I had to do to add a line of code so that the XinMo2 board could tell that I had two controllers. We even had two players on the arcade and two on PS3 controllers for Gauntlet. It was the 80s again, only the coins didn't run out, I just pushed a button. It was glorious. I loved the arcade games of the mid eighties (time pilot, elevator action, ghosts and goblins, galaga, outrun, bubble bobble, gauntlet, defender, gyruss, kungfu master, commando, paperboy and Rally-X. Also some of the early 90s like Street Fighter 2 (and CE etc) Simpsons/TMNT and NBA Jam.
Then disaster.
The main cheap Zippy joystick broke which came as part of the starter kit. I wanted to replace it with Sanwa joysticks and why not upgrade to super-sounding Happ concave buttons and an IPAC2 keyboard encoder, which (blue button below) would allow me to pause the game (which is a much bigger deal as a dad than my spotty 16 ear old self!) and another extra button (purple below) which would allow us to enter the dip switches and make the game easier/harder/add more lives/ configure specific buttons for different games etc which would be a bonus. But as the controllers weren't split with that line of code last time (is the code different for different keyboard encoders?)
I spent another huge amount of time wrangling it all together (so many wriggling wires under the button casing..) but finally it all was connected again. The IPAC2 come preconfigured so I don't even need to set the keys which I did previously on retropie/emulation station.
But. When I booted up some games, the controllers acted very strangely. When I configured the standard directions and buttons on Emulation Station, and then loaded some games, then some games (Commando, Pac Man) would behave like the joystick movements had rotated by one position ie if you pushed up, it went up right, if you pushed up right, it went right. If you loaded other games (SF2) then the controls would be out by two positions ie if you pushed up it would go right, if you pushed up/right it would go down/right.
I used to push the player 1/start and coin buttons together, and that would exit the game and go back to emulation station. Now you have to do it multiple times before it figures it out.
I'm not sure if the kit I bought was faulty, or if I just haven't set it up right, or if some of the config from my previous installation is messing with some new config it requires.
But I sure would like to get it working again. I'd like to see if I can fix what I have, and if I can't do that maybe rebuild the whole hardware again.
Please help!
Thanks
Adam
We built the hardware with a RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi (either 3 or 4) and Emulation Station. We picked up a cheap pack of joysticks and buttons and an XinMo2 board keyboard encoder which came with the starter pack.
After some painful wrangling and testing and wrangling, it worked for all the games that were working. There was something special I had to do to add a line of code so that the XinMo2 board could tell that I had two controllers. We even had two players on the arcade and two on PS3 controllers for Gauntlet. It was the 80s again, only the coins didn't run out, I just pushed a button. It was glorious. I loved the arcade games of the mid eighties (time pilot, elevator action, ghosts and goblins, galaga, outrun, bubble bobble, gauntlet, defender, gyruss, kungfu master, commando, paperboy and Rally-X. Also some of the early 90s like Street Fighter 2 (and CE etc) Simpsons/TMNT and NBA Jam.
Then disaster.
The main cheap Zippy joystick broke which came as part of the starter kit. I wanted to replace it with Sanwa joysticks and why not upgrade to super-sounding Happ concave buttons and an IPAC2 keyboard encoder, which (blue button below) would allow me to pause the game (which is a much bigger deal as a dad than my spotty 16 ear old self!) and another extra button (purple below) which would allow us to enter the dip switches and make the game easier/harder/add more lives/ configure specific buttons for different games etc which would be a bonus. But as the controllers weren't split with that line of code last time (is the code different for different keyboard encoders?)
I spent another huge amount of time wrangling it all together (so many wriggling wires under the button casing..) but finally it all was connected again. The IPAC2 come preconfigured so I don't even need to set the keys which I did previously on retropie/emulation station.
But. When I booted up some games, the controllers acted very strangely. When I configured the standard directions and buttons on Emulation Station, and then loaded some games, then some games (Commando, Pac Man) would behave like the joystick movements had rotated by one position ie if you pushed up, it went up right, if you pushed up right, it went right. If you loaded other games (SF2) then the controls would be out by two positions ie if you pushed up it would go right, if you pushed up/right it would go down/right.
I used to push the player 1/start and coin buttons together, and that would exit the game and go back to emulation station. Now you have to do it multiple times before it figures it out.
I'm not sure if the kit I bought was faulty, or if I just haven't set it up right, or if some of the config from my previous installation is messing with some new config it requires.
But I sure would like to get it working again. I'd like to see if I can fix what I have, and if I can't do that maybe rebuild the whole hardware again.
Please help!
Thanks
Adam
