So what do you do when you get a free table from someone online and an old computer screen? You strip off all the casing from the computer screen down to its raw components, take a circular saw to the table to cut out an opening for the screen to fit in, of course.
This was the initial thought which led to the conception of our idea that we wanted to build a retro arcade game table out of old scraps of hardware and into something that’s truly unique. We also wanted to draw upon a wide range of maker skills like woodworking, electronics, building computers and CAD. This arcade game table has been tilted up to provide better viewing angles for gameplay, it runs on a Raspberry pi 4 running the RetroPie distro.
The two built in controllers each connect to a USB breakout board which are presented to the pi as game controllers. We got some button layouts online and drew them up in CAD, used a CNC router to cut out templates and then used them to guide us in our drilling of the holes for the buttons and joysticks. The heavy base is from some scrap fence post offcuts which have been routed to take off the splintery rough cut edges.
