Retropie Arcade Bartop

The case of the first bartop has been replaced with a case made of acrylic glass.

Some games on MAME and N64 emulators are lagging so I installed a heat sink and a fan (recovered from an used laptop) and overclocked a little bit the Pi 3 following that guide.

Emulators are now running a a little bit more smoothly (some PSP / PSX games are not playable thought).

With the fan, SOC (overclocked) temperature is around 50 ° C.

I just finished my 3rd bartop (and I think last). Build went smoothly (no joystick or screen problem like on the previous one).
I added some LED lights at the bottom to make it cool.

Like a lot of people, I had trouble using 2 Xin-Mo joysticks on my second arcade station. It was like both were the same joystick.
It’s really strange since the first one didn’t had that problem and it seems that components are the same. I even dump the SD card from one Raspberry Pi to another without success (same problem on the second arcade station, running a Raspberry Pi 3).

Solution found on Retropie-setup about Xin Mo Controller didn’t work for me.

So, I finally connect one controller directly to Pi GPIO, like explained on post "Connecting Arcade Buttons to Raspberry Pi GPIO Pins" or on "Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi".

You’ll have to clone Adafruit-Retrogame, configure /boot/retrogame.cfg file, add a udev rule and launch retrogame at startup.

Also, default mapping for select button (space) causes some problem in game (emulator running a lot faster). I had to change the default key (space) for 'b' to fix that bug.

Update 15/05/2021 : Got the same problem on new bar top build and fixed it via that method (unplugged the 2nd player side's 4 pin (up, down, left, right) connector and turned it around and plugged it right).

While installing a second station, I had a problem with resolution by default in 800x600 on a 19" screen.

To force native resolution (1280x1024), I had to set in /boot/config.txt the following lines :

hdmi_drive=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=35

More information can be found here : http://elinux.org/RPiconfig#Video

The 3000 ma 5V power supply is enought to power a Raspberry Pi 2 and the Amplifier Board-PAM8803 using a micro usb Y splitter.

However, if you use a Raspberry Pi 3, it isn’t enough to power both (bad audio quality). You’ll need a dedicated power supply for the amplifier.