2 Player Arcade with Ply and Extrusion

I was asked on several occasions about possibly coming up with a 2-player console as some felt that a single player with a bit "selfish" and more moreover, it's just not the same playing Street-Fighter to versus a machine than to versus an actual player. As I had a lot of left over metal extrusion (which we have used to make all of workbench, tables and chairs) so why not...

Next course of action was to source for a used 32" LCD monitor screen and from there, cut the extrusion accordingly to match the size of the screen and then the wiring hook up. The build principle is similar to the build of "Yappy" (i.e. my 1-player Arcade console) and the build page can be found at this link. The extra conponents required are the HDMI to VGA adapter (not necessary if your monitor allows HDMI input), an extra set of joysticks with it's buttons and "housing" (in this case, the extrusion and the panels).

As I used Raspberry Pi version 2 for all my build and because the 32" LCD monitor that I used has only VGA connection, there is a need to convert HDMI output from the Raspberry Pi to VGA input for my monitor. I source around my shop and was able to find a Dell HDMI-to-VGA active converter. The picture below shows the HDMI-to-VGA converter.

Do note: Not all HDMI-to-VGA cable works, you need an "active" converter which means that the converter does a bit of conversion from HDMI signal to VGA. Some passive cable does not work as it's straight mapping and does nothing to "tell" the HDMI signal what to do.

The 2-player arcade wiring is a bit more complicated but similar to that of the 1-player and the wiring schematic onto the Raspberry Pi can be found over the internet so I won't go into the details of the wiring.

The finished aluminium profile extrusion 2-player arcade all done and wired up.

Next up was the wooden 2-player version. Below are the unfinished prototype version of the 2-player arcade system. Some more comestic works that needs to be done on them for for now, this will do.

UPDATE:

I was fortunate enough that our next-door neighbors are a bunch of talented designers. They actually came up with some ideas on building a "fancy" version of my 2-player arcade. In due time... my friends... in due time...