This guide goes through all the steps necessary to build your own full-size arcade machine, including the
pre-designed CAD-files, how to assemble all the cabinet parts, how to set up the Raspberry Pi running the arcade program
etc. The project was my first project going from CAD to actual build (actually also the first time I used a CAD
program).
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-fischer-92997281/
Here you can see the arcade machines built from this design by the community.
Table of content
-
Build the cabinet
- Download the CAD-file
- CNC parts
- Hand-cut parts
- Draw outlines of parts
- Cut wood biscuits holes
- Glue main parts together
- Adding cabinet legs
- Add screen panel
- Preparing the light box
- Spackling paste and sanding
- Spray painting
- Art work
-
Add electronics
- Add electricity to the cabinet
- Screen
- Light box
- Arcade buttons and joystick
- Set up RetroPie on Raspberry Pi
- Configure arcade buttons and joysticks
- Power button
- Speakers
- Structure cables
-
Final arcade machine
- Contact
-
Arcade machines built by the community
Build the cabinet
Download the CAD-file
The CAD design was created in AutoCAD Fusion 360. This was my first experience using any CAD-program, so the design
is likely far from optimal and there are probably a lot of possibilities for improvements. Note that all the CAD-files are in millimeters.
3d
Watch the CAD-file on GitHub’s 3D File Viewer
Download CAD-file (.dwg)
Download CAD-file (.obj)
Download CAD-file (.step)
Download CAD-file (.stl)
Download CAD-file (.f3d)
2d
Download side panel (.dxf)
Download screen panel (.dxf)
Download button panel (.dxf)
Download below button panel (.dxf)
Download back panel (.dxf)
Download hatch outside panel (.dxf)
Download hatch inside panel (.dxf)
Download bottom panel (.dxf)
Download lightbox top (.dxf)
Download lightbox bottom (.dxf)
CNC parts
To get a perfect fit for the arcade buttons and joysticks, the screen, the power button and the speakers, the
button panel and the screen panel were CNC-cut. This was more expensive than doing it by hand, but lead to a much
better finish. To make the cabinet fit perfectly together, the two side panels were also CNC cut, as they have multiple
rounded shapes that need to be identical on both sides.
Oh, and remember to CNC-cut the CAD file on size 1:1 and not “utilize full MDF board”… ¯\(ツ)/¯
Hand-cut parts
As the rest of the parts were more or less rectangular, they were cut by “hand”. To do this, two different mounted saws
were used:
- A vertical panel saw to cut down the MDF to smaller pieces
- A table saw to cut out the final pieces
| Piece |
Image |
| Back panel |
 |
| Bottom panel |
 |
| Below button panel |
 |
| Hatch panel |
 |
| Light box panel 1 |
Missing |
| Light box panel 2 |
 |
The only panel that needed some more work was the hatch panel. The outlines of the hatch were first sketched on the
panel.
A circle saw was then used to cut out the actual hatch.
A hand held jigsaw was used for the edges as it’s difficult to know how far the circle saw will cut.
After the main part was separated into the inner and outer part, “blockers” were glued and nailed into place. This,
together with a standard window magnet was used to keep the hatch in place.
A hole was also cut at the top of the inner part to enable it to be opened.
A hole was also drilled at the bottom of the large back panel to prepare for a power strip to be inserted.
Draw outlines of parts
It was important to fixate all the parts at the same location on both side panels for the cabinet to be symmetrical. To
simplify this, outlines were drawn where each panel was supposed to be attached to the side panels. As the button panel
and the screen panel were attached at an angle, their outlines were first drawn on one of the side panels. Then the
outlines were reflected and transferred to the other side panel by using some reference points. It was a bit tricky,
so take your time.
Cut wood biscuits holes
To hold all the panels together, wood biscuits, wood glue and a nail gun were used. The wood biscuits are not only good
for making the cabinet robust, but they also help with fixating all the panels at the right places and angles. The only
panel that wasn’t attached with wood biscuits was the screen panel. The reason was for the screen to be interchangeable
if it breaks, something that is not possible (or atleast very difficult) if the panel is glued in place.
When using the wood biscuit cutter, it’s important that the holes end up at the correct place at the aligning panels.
One simple way of solving this is to align your panels and then draw a line on both panels at the center of where you
want the biscuit to be. If you do this, the holes will end up at the right place.
Before gluing all the parts together, make sure that they fit by placing each panel at their place. A tip is to draw
shapes (triangles, circles etc) on connecting parts, so you easily know which parts that go together later on.
Glue main parts together
When gluing the parts together, you’ll need to be fairly quick and structured. I started of by laying down one side
panel first, then gluing the middle parts and finally gluing the other side panel.
Start of by adding the glue in the wood biscuit holes. Then press down the wood biscuits into the holes. After that you
apply wood glue along all the connecting parts and press them together.
When done, make sure that all the parts are aligned and in the right position. Then apply force using large clamps and
nail everything together using a nail gun.
Also, don’t forget to remove redundant glue dripping out from the connecting parts, it makes it much easier to get a
nice finish later on.
Adding cabinet legs
To distribute the upwards force from the legs, a small block of wood was glued and nailed in each corner inside the
cabinet.
I had some wood laying around that I used as legs for the cabinet. After cutting out four squares, make sure that they
fit nicely in each corner.
Use a sand paper to round the edges.
The legs was then glued from the outside and screwed from the inside.
Add screen panel
To be able to easily remove and change the screen, the screen panel was screwed in place. Two slim wood bars were
glued and nailed on each inner side at the correct angle for the screen panel to rest on.
To get a nice seamless look of the screen, a handheld milling machine was used to extract a slot for the screen on the
back side of the screen panel.
The screen I used had button on the front, so I needed to drill holes in the screen panel for them to be clickable.
Finally, the screw keeping the screen panel in place were aligned with the speakers to get a nice look.
Preparing the light box
As a true retro arcade cabinet, of course we need a glowing light box at the top of the cabinet. To keep the plexiglass
in place, four small wood cubes were glued and nailed at each corner for the plexiglass to rest on.
Spackling paste and sanding
Before the cabinet was sent to spray painting, final touches were made to get a nice smooth finish. Spackling paste
was applied to cover up all the nails and plastic padding was used to cover up small visible mistakes made. When
everything had dried, an electric sander was used to remove redundant spackling paste and plastic padding. All the edges
was smoothed by manual sanding.
Spray painting
To get a nice finish, I payed a professional to spray paint the cabinet in a black lacquer color. To get a good
light reflection in the light box, I got it painted white.
Art work
I’m familiar with Adobe Illustrator, but far from an expert in creating art work. So to create the art work, I paid for
a premium subscription at Freepik (https://www.freepik.com) that costs 9.99 €/month. This enabled me to download a bunch
of different high-quality vectorized retro illustrations that I combined into the final art work. When done, I printed them
as stickers.
A good way to apply the art work is to tape the sticker at one side to fixate it, then you remove some of the
cover and start scraping it from the bottom up. By doing so, you’ll get it at the exact position while reducing the
number of bubbles.
The side stickers were so large that they had to be split into two separate parts. To keep the correct alignment,
arrows were drawn indicating where the two parts should align. A small space were kept at the bottom to reduce the risk
of the sticker being peeled off.
Stickers indicating the button configuration were also added.
Add electronics
Add electricity to the cabinet
A round plastic cable grommet was inserted into the hole previously drilled at the bottom of the back panel. A
power strip was then added.
Screen
The screen was kept in place by using galvanized banding straps.
Light box
To get a consistent feel of the art work I reused some of the graphical component from the side panels.
The art work was printed as one large sticker and the text “ARCADE MACHINE” was cut out to let the light through. The
sticker was then attached to a frosted plexiglas.
For the light source I used a LED tube of fitting length, with a wire that was long enough to go all the way
down to the power strip at the bottom of the cabinet. The LED tube was attached to the back panel by using
double-coated adhesive tape.
To remove potential light leakage around the plexiglas, long stripes of foam was cut and attached behind the plexiglas
edges using double-coated adhesive tape.
Double-coated adhesive tape was also used to keep the plexiglas in place.
Before I started this project, I bought two sets of arcade buttons and joysticks from Aliexpress. This type of button set is very
convenient to use, even without any knowledge of electronic circuit boards. I don’t know if this exact set is still
available, but I’ve seen multiple vendors selling similar types of arcade button sets.
Using this type of set makes hooking up the buttons very simple. You attach each button and the joystick to the circuit
board that is included in the set. Then you connect the USB-cord to the circuit board and to the computer.
To center the joysticks in the holes, I used a wide double-coated adhesive tape normally used to attach rugs to
floors. It’s easier to be two people doing this, one person centering the joystick from the top, while the other person
locking it in place. The joysticks were then screwed into the button panel.
Set up RetroPie on Raspberry Pi
RetroPie (https://retropie.org.uk/) is the program that enables you to create a retro gaming station out of the
Raspberry Pi. As RetroPie is an open-source project that is continuously updated, it’s easiest for you to follow the
installation guide on their website: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/ (visited at 2020-09-06).
The USB cables from the arcade button electronic circuit boards were connected to the Raspberry Pi.
When the Raspberry Pi is turned on and RetroPie is started, a welcome screen should be visible, asking you to configure
the controllers.
To enable a convenient way of shutting down the arcade machine, I added a hole in the screen panel,
fitting a power button.
Two cables were then soldered to the button and attached to the GPIO pins 5 and 6 on the Raspberry Pi (see a
GPIO diagram here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/gpio/, visited 2020-09-06). When shortening the
GPIO pins 5 and 6, the Raspberry Pi is natively waken up from its halted state.
A small script was then added and executed on start up of the Raspberry Pi. The script listened to another shortening of
the GPIO pins 5 and 6, that then triggered a safe shutdown of the machine.
To add the shutdown script, do the following:
- Start the Raspberry Pi
- When the EmulationStation (RetroPie) has started, click F4 on your keyboard to enter bash
- Make sure that you have python and pip installed
- Install RPi.GPIO:
pip install RPi.GPIO (see https://pypi.org/project/RPi.GPIO/)
- Create a utils folder under /home:
mkdir /home/utils/
- Add this script (shutdown_script.py) to the newly created utils folder
- To make the Raspberry run this script on start up, add the line
python3 /home/utils/shutdown_script.py & at the
end of the file /etc/rc.local, just before exit 0
As of now, the power button only shuts down the Raspberry Pi. In the future, I would like to add a relay controlled by
the Raspberry Pi, turning of all the other electronics as well (screen, light box etc).
Speakers
Two speaker wires were soldered to each speaker. The speakers were then placed in the CNC-cut holes and attached by
screws to the screen panel. All cables were then connected to the amplifier. A 3.5mm AUX stereo cable was then
connected between the amplifier and the Raspberry Pi.
Structure cables
To keep everything nice and structured inside the cabinet, I attached cable canals with double-coated adhesive tape.
Final arcade machine
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me:
Arcade machine 1
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