Comment by platevoltage

1 month ago

I found a 1988 Sega arcade cabinet on the side of the street and decided to resto-mod it. The CRT in the cab has lost its blues, so I recapped and reflowed the board, which brought that back to life. I started off using a Raspberry Pi 5, and used a GPIO to VGA hat to generate the 15khz RGB signal that the monitor expects. I ended up abandoning this method in favor of using a GBS-control scaler in order to get 32bit color output.

The control panel was built from scratch. I used an ESP32 board to detect inputs from the buttons, as well as drive the RGB LEDS in the buttons. Th ESP32 outputs keyboard keypresses, and accepts serial input over USB to change the color of the buttons. My goal here is to have the buttons illuminate based on which game is loaded.

Lastly, I embedded a stream deck module in the control panel for auxiliary functions. For this, I built a node app to operate the stream deck given the lack of Linux support from Elgato. I'm going to put together a big blog post once I get closer to completion, but for now, here are some photos.