Artendo

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Artendo news & progress

Concieved in the 3rd week of May, in the year of 2005, the Artendo will be a full sized arcade cabinet with my trusty 'ol Toshiba laptop running emulators for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)

I've always liked playing arcade games, I don't play often, I'm too cheap for that, but I do enjoy the occasional game of Galaga, Carnevil, or any number of racing games. However, I do not like going out of my way to find an arcade that actually has those games and doesn't charge an arm and a leg to play them too. One night, I was again randomly seaching the internet for something interesting to read when I came across this site: MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Wow, an arcade machine emulator! And look, other people have actually built arcade consoles with MAME on a computer in them! I promptly downloaded the software and searched for a rom for Galaga (my favorite arcade game), just to try it out. I put it in the /roms/ folder and fired up MAME. I was crushed, it asked for 7 more roms that I could not find! Still wanting to play Galaga, but not wanting to mess with MAME anymore, I just decided to use a NES emulator and get the NES version of Galaga. BING! A bell went off: Why not just build a cab running a NES and SNES emulator!? Yes, that is what I will do. And just like that, it had been started.

What it will be:

As stated above, the Artendo will be an arcade cabinet with a computer running some Nintendo games. I began to research arcade cabinet building. I came across this most excellent site; simple, informative, complete. Build Your Own Arcade Controls. After I did a bunch of research, I went on to the design.

CPU:

I will be using my Satellite pro laptop to run the games, it isn't good for much else. I did buy a new keyboard for it but it still has some undesirable quirks that make it unusable for a full time portable laptop, though for an embedded application like this, it will be perfect.

Monitor

The monitor is an old, heavy as hell, 16 inch Viewsonic Optiquest. It's my largest monitor, other than my Dell, and it should do fine for the Artendo monitor.

Controls and controller interface:

Control interface is the biggest thing to consider when building an arcade cabinet. Build Your Own Arcade Controls details a couple options for doing this. Many people will take apart old keyboards and hack the matrix for input, but keyboards were not meant to be video game controllers and suffer from conditions called ghosting and masking. Both of these conditions is explaned on the BYOAC site so I won't waste time doing what's already been done.

The most successfull and popular option is to buy a keyboard encoder, a circut that hooks into your computer's PS/2 (keyboard) port and mimics the keyboard, though without ghosting or masking problems. I would have used one of these, but I can find cheaper ways to get the same result.

Another option was to hack a computer gamepad. The only problem with this is that I needed 24 inputs and any joystick that would run in DOS could not begin to supply what I needed. Plus they are expensive and my laptop doesn't have a gameport anyway.

I chose a cross between the keyboard hack and the gampepad hack. There have been projects that have interfaced the Nintendo controllers to the PC parallel port. I did a bit of research on how the controllers worked and I must say, Nintendo was on the ball when they designed those controllers. They used a simple industry standard device to convert the parallel data from the butons into a serial data stream for transmition. They used what is called a "shift register". A shift register is a simple device that acts as a parallel to serial encoder. More information on this marvelous little device can be found at the bottom of this page.

I will be using 2 shift register circuts from this page to read the 2 super 8 joysticks and 16 generic buttons from Happ Controls. The signals will then be fed into the CPU's parallel port where Sneskey will decode the serial signals and map them to the keyboard.

Audio:

I haven't given much thought to the sound system, I am supposed to be receving a new tube amp soon so I'll probably end up sticking my old Hi-Fi amp and some radioshack speakers into it. That should get the job done quite nicely.

Power Management

The laptop will have a constant connection to the mains, and the power button will be routed to the Player1 button on the control panel. A nice feature of the Sneskey program is that whenever it is on (wich means the computer is ready to go) it brings a couple lines on the parallel port high. I will use these signals to drive a surplus SMPS I have, to power the controller shift registers, the lights, and the fans. There will also be a plug on a relay inside the cab for the monitor and amp that will turn on with the SMPS.

Picture compliments of Steve Campbell, Don't use them without asking him first, and for all the other pictures on my site, ask me before using.

5/24/05