Having an arcade cabinet at home is wonderful, but lack of space can be a problem for many players. With the arrival of the Raspberry Pi, the possibility of creating more compact and efficient replicas became a reality, and one of the best examples out there is the one by PleaseNoFisticuffs on Instructables, who built a desktop Mortal Kombat II arcade cabinet with full-size controls and custom art.
Reproducing the content of an arcade machine is simple: all you need is a Raspberry Pi, a copy of RetroPie, and some games (while yelling 'to hell with copyright' in the background). Configuring RetroPie is less complicated than it seems, and once it's ready, you connect a normal gamepad or something more specialized.
The alternative is to go into 'full arcade' mode and build everything from scratch, including the cabinet. I admit that a project with these characteristics becomes expensive in record time, but we learn a lot along the way, we can choose the components, and change the size of the arcade to our liking. That's what user PleaseNoFisticuffs on Instructables did. His plan was to build a Mortal Kombat II arcade cabinet with Raspberry Pi, combining a desktop design and full-size controls.
Building the Mortal Kombat II Arcade Cabinet
The first step is to print the cabinet template on A3 sheets to respect the dimensions and simplify the cuts (remember this is optional, you can adopt the cabinet style you prefer). With the cuts already made, the preparation phase for the screen and control panels begins. PleaseNoFisticuffs uses a compatible 7-inch screen. It is one of the most expensive components of the entire project, since it includes controller boards, cables, and a remote control, but if you find something cheaper, don't hesitate.
Oh, beautiful labyrinth! One would be happy to get lost there...
PleaseNoFisticuffs makes several recommendations and warnings in his text. One of them is not to use fiberboard for resistance reasons (unless it's thick and of very good quality?). In fact, the side panels are double in his design. Once the cabinet is glued, move on to the RetroPie installation phase. Here we notice that he downloads one of the Arcade Punks images. That saves time, although the size of the images is enormous, and you'll need an adequate SD card.
Finally, the tutorial takes us to the configuration of the power button (the Raspberry Pi can't do this by itself yet), to changing the RetroPie startup screen, connecting all the components inside the cabinet (a beautiful and chaotic spaghetti), and finishing the cabinet. The result speaks for itself, and as always, the best part is that nothing stops you from adapting the project to your available resources. Bigger or smaller screen, quality buttons or cheap ones, replacing the Raspberry Pi with an old computer... there are almost no limits.
Access the full tutorial: Click here.
