alt Hacker NewsRCade: Building a Community Arcade Cabinet
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This is awesome I’m currently sitting across from the RCade. Yay!
The "hardware" section is really cool, and then you get to the "software" section and it's just webslop.
this is a really cool project. I also appreciate the work that went into retaining the original CRT, that's usually the first thing to go in other projects like this but it does so much to make it feel special and not just another computer in a box.
It is cool but... I much prefer to go an emulate the real thing: if you are using a CRT anyway (2nd sentence in TFA says it's using a CRT), you may as well make the cab compatible with the good old arcade JAMMA standard, use a Pi2JAMMA adapter, and stick a Raspberry Pi into the cab.
As a bonus you can then buy old PCBs and switch between either your Pi or a real PCB.
It's also much simpler: no need for complicated controllers and whatnots for all the heavy lifting is done by the Pi2JAMMA adapter.
It's what I have: a real arcade cab (a vintage one, from the 80s) but "modernized" in that at any time I can switch between real PCBs (I've got both real vintage PCBs and vintage bootleg PCBs: a prized possession) and my Pi+Pi2JAMMA.
I take it anything that can be run in TFA can be run on a Pi: I'm not sure if that project does something that couldn't run from a Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter so maybe I'm misunderstanding the (cool and good looking) project.
The marquee that's a display that can change is nice: I've seen a few arcade cabs (on arcade cabs forums) that had these and they'd switch the picture depending on the game being played.
They also showed me the Wondercab, an open-source arcade cabinet design
Does anyone know what they mean by open-source arcade cabinet design? I went to the link expecting plans/instructions to build one, but there's nothing of the sort there. The RCade cabinet even appears to be based not on the Wondercab's design, but on the Taito Gameroom classics cabinet...
This is great.
But when I read the headline I was kind of hoping it might be a home arcade machine that also let me watch other people playing (ala’twitch) but then also allow me to join the game (or even take it over).
Microsoft Edge has some interesting properties for this project:
- It's a fork of Chrome.
- It has a Linux build.
- It has a kiosk mode.
- It's probably not the browser that a Linux user would be using for things they care about, so it has no authenticated state.
It should be relatively simple to add Edge as a non-Steam game, with a kiosk session pointed at rcade.dev. That would allow people to add an rcade.dev tile to their SteamOS game library, and play any of the games on the platform.