If you aren’t familiar with the Raspberry Pi—do yourself a favor and get an education. There was a very long waiting list and I managed to score a Pi very early. Now that people are starting to announce their projects, I thought I should as well.

Idea

I am building a MAME cabinet. How is this different or unique considering it was one of the first Raspberry Pi projects posted to Hackaday? Mine addresses my main concern with arcade cabinets—space. In Huricane Katrina I lost 2 coin-op arcades, Kangaroo and Donkey Kong 3 (I had Mechanized Attack when I was younger but we donated it to charity).

Now that I live in NY, I don’t have any additional space to enjoy arcades the way I used to. My design is going to take full advantage of the Raspberry Pi’s size and the limitations of living in the greatest city in the US. Stay posted for pictures and progress!

Info & Design

Marquee:

While disposing of my waterlogged arcades, I decided to keep both of the marquees, but after a while, the Kangaroo marquee fell apart (it was glass with the design printed on the reverse side). Donkey Kong 3′s marquee is printed plastic and I have kept it after all of these years and will be the marquee on my MAME build. I know having Donkey Kong graphics doesn’t match MAME, but I think it is a fitting application considering my circumstances.

Screen:

I am using a monitor that I salvaged a while back. I was gifted three broken 19″ Apple Monitors a while back. After doing some research on the problem I diagnosed that they had blown LDOs (low dropout regulator). I sourced a replacement on eBay, had a bitch of a time soldering SMD without a reflow, and was (eventually) back in business.

Joystick:

I am using one of the optimized joystick layouts from SlagCoin, but converted into a 6 button layout.

Cabinet:
Current Design:

As you can see from the drawing, I will be deleting a lot of the useless part of the arcade—while not losing any functionality.  I will have 2 speakers, light up marquee, 2 player joysticks, and coin operation.

UPDATE 1

I have compiled AdvanceMAME on my RPI and have been testing out different roms—most of them don’t play back that well yet. BUT! Surprisingly my favorite TurboGraFX16 game, Side Arms, works really well.
This is the (not even considered a setup yet) setup so far, all of the other parts are in the mail/still being hacked together. I find it really sad that the Apple monitor’s power inverter is larger than the RPI itself…

The question I kept getting while doing this is “WTF, the DS already has buttons, so why why would you need a controller?” The answer being, “so I can play NES roms as they were supposed to be played.”

This is the NES collection that I saved from Katrina only to eventually ebay because I was moving too much to keep carrying them with me.
ANYWAY, on to the actual tutorial.
First off you will need to disassemble your ds. there are many great tutorials on how to do this already
Now that you have done that, you can locate the button pin-outs, which have been mapped by a user over at acidmods.com (thanks dslitemodder)

now all you have to do is solder wire, I used 30awg kynar wire from radio shack to each of the pin outs you plan on using. In my case I used the U, D, L, R of the directional pad and the Y, B, Select, and Start.

From there you can solder the other end of those wires to the GBA pins on the other side of the DS, be sure to keep track of which wires go where. You can do this by saying the U button is the 5th from the left, or however you can keep track of it.

Something to keep in mind when doing this is that the third pin from the left has voltage(+) and the second pin from the right is a ground(-) (as pictured above) other than that you can use whichever GBA pins you like, I used every other pin when doing mine just to give each connection enough room where they wouldn’t short out.

Now you are finished with the inside of the ds
And moving on to the NES controller.
you will notice that the NES controller only has 6 wires coming out of it and you will be needing 8, so you will have to fashion your own length of cable to use.
From this side you will trace the button contacts on the inside on the NES controller to the solder-able points and using the same kynar wire and similar notations as used on the inside of the ds, you can come out of it with this result

On each connection you solder be sure to leave about 10 inches of extra wire so that you dont have to hug your ds when playing with your controller.
With the other end of the wires, align them with the corresponding pins on your GBA filler card, that comes with your ds

To finish up the project I just wrapped the NES cable I made out of the kynar wire with electrical tape.
**A couple of things to keep in mind when doing this modifications!
I also use a ezFlash 3in1 with my ds, and the ruble pack and expansion ram both work properly, but the gba games freeze when you press a button…I havent tested this with an actual GBA game, so I dont know if this only occurs with the roms.
Also, I use a DSTT flash card, and on the main menu of it, you select roms to load with the A button, which I did not wire my NES controller to handle…So what I did was solder an extra wire from the DS mother board’s A pin out, to the same GBA pin that I use for the start button on the NES controller. This means that when I push start on the NES controller its actually pressing A+Start, which doesnt actually affect gameplay, but it does allow me to opperate the entire DSTT menu system from my NES controller
AND THATS IT!
you can also see my original post on acidmods which also contains a slight SNES tutorial.
whew…
I know that Im not the best writer, so if you have any specific questions or anything really, you can usually find me on aim (fatkidslikecandy) or by email (parker@parkerbowab.com)