ITS THE END!

May 4th and May 5th. The final post in this series.

No, don't cry. It's going to be OK. 

How?

Because I'm already planning the NEXT project and it will be done without time pressure and a larger (but not by much) budget. 

Before finishing the arcade cabinet I was ordered by management to build a new shelf for the kitchen. 

There. Now we can get to business.

Now all the wires are in place its time to get the software setup. I found a few guides on enabling GPIO controllers in Retropie, but there were many that were out of date or had various problems. This worked a treat. Pretty easy, just a few lines and then a simple setup. All the buttons and the sticks were detected during setup so I knew they all worked as they should.

And, after a couple of restarts of Emulation Station, the controllers were detected. The third one is the wired Xbox 360 controller I was using for testing.

Had some problems getting the right controllers to be active. That was an easy fix: unplug the Xbox pad!

The next morning. Need to get some chores out of the way before I can carry on. Shelves glued together.

After some playtesting, I find that player one has a dodgy stick. Down is intermittent. I pat myself on the back for wiring this with unpluggable dupont connectors. Should be easy to whip this joystick out and fix it.

Then I realise I have soldered all the grounds to the stick. And they are not unpluggable. Facepalm.

Still got enough room to strip down the stick. This is the errant microswitch. With a multimeter connected to it, I can see it's not making good contact.

I have this spare, but it doesn't have the long lever arm the one in the stick has over the switch.

Useful to poke around inside though, I can see how it should look. The faulty one opened just as easy as this, just pry open the cover, and a quick rub over the contacts sorted it out. 

Software still needs sorting. The image I am using is by someone that calls themselves by the humourous moniker of Tits McGee. I have to get rid of the boobs. Very young nephews would find them far too funny and I can't have that. A dig around in the menus and settings sorts that. Also managed to turn off the Irish background music that was good for the first five minutes and then got pretty annoying. I'd be just as annoyed by any national music to be fair, nothing against the Irish.

Final touches. Dust cover missing on player two stick.

I need to play this again. Selected at random. It's a Streets of Rage type game called Powered Gear. I had a blast playing this.

Dust cover robbed from a new stick. I will need to replace that when I get my 3d printer up and running later.

And it is FINISHED.

I spent around £40 on everything I didn't already own. 

I had a screen. 

I had controls.

I had speakers.

I bought wood (£10)

I bought paint (£20)

I bought fixings, cables and adaptors (£10)

I suppose if you add the value of the previous items I already owned. 

Screen (£20)

Controls (£30)

Speakers (£20)

A few other cables (£5)

The whole thing is worth £115 in parts. Not bad!

But anyway. We are done. That is it, finished.

Wait a minute! 

Oh look, a pi 3A+ 

This is going in the next build, so stay tuned. Keep an eye on Twitter or subscribe to this blog if you want to know what happens next! Hope you found this interesting, and thanks for taking a look!

Gus says BYE! (Or "What year is it?")