Vanguard Arcade Machine
The 80’s was the time that I was growing up and had many fond memories of the arcade systems as I have spent countless coins (was a fortune then) playing games like pac-man, space invaders, street fighters and many more. One of my favorite was “Crazy Climber” and at one point in my life, I have downloaded the actual arcade built for just that game itself and said that I would “one day” build the machine; it’s in my bucket list =)
Over the years, I came to know of M.A.M.E. system (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and thought it was a great way to “quickly” build an arcade. It was then in recent years (late 2014) that I decided to start out on a mission to build a home arcade system that could play all the classic video games as well as those fairly new games. I have played around with emulator way back in the early 2000 and have quite an in-depth knowledge on how it all worked. After months of researching, and visiting tons of websites, and prototyping various versions of arcade housing, the first prototype was build out of vanguard sheet.
My first order of business when I started out with the vanguard sheet, was to source for the parts and then modeled it onto Google Sketchup 3D program. That process took me a while, as along the way, I have to wait for the parts, swap/ change/ upgraded the components to figure out what works best. Once that was out of the way, I was able to finally put together all the components required to make my 1st retro arcade system.
I would like to thank the following (in no particular order) for their knowledge and willingness to share that I have been able to attain my knowledge from their articles:
Ryan Bates @ RetroBuildGames on his insightful / in-depth coverage of his retro pie build (i.e. please note that that in no way his schematic was copied… just in case he is reading this)
Rasmus Keonig Sorensen @ koenigs.dk on many of his in-depth coverage of retro pie build
Adafruit.com under the “learn” sections where wealth of information are covered on raspberry pie built
Instructables.com under the sections “arcade” where wealth of information can be obtained from there
