Each button within the joystick featured the same pinout as the arcade buttons.

We used the active-low and ground pins so that pressing a button would drive the input pin to the Raspberry Pi low and trigger a falling-edge callback event within our Python program. The arcade style buttons have three pins designations: ground, active-low, and active-high. Two small buttons hidden at the top of the system’s housing contain two pins each. In the main menu of the system, one can read an ‘About’ section listing out the developer names, launch the pre-built EmulationStation to play classic game ROMs, play any of the three games we built, view the high scores for our pre-built games, and cleanly shut down the system.Īll of the buttons and joystick controls are mapped to GPIO input pins on the Raspberry Pi. While working on top of this pre-built image, we made three of our own Python games. The GPIO button inputs to the Raspberry Pi are mapped to a virtual gamepad which can be used to manipulate menu screens and perform actions within the custom-build games and ROMs. Within these emulators, we pre-loaded a sampling of classic video game ROMs. Within this menu screen, the user can launch a pre-built EmulationStation which can run emulators of classic systems like the Nintendo Game Boy, NES, SNES, and much more. On the software side, we created a menu screen that launches on bootup of the system. Finally, the 3.5mm jack needed to be broken out so that all four connection points were exposed and could be spliced into separate connectors to produce composite video for the screen as well as a stereo output for the speakers.

All of the buttons and the joystick needed to have their leads crimped and soldered in order to cleanly interface with the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.

On the hardware side, the entire cabinet needed to be designed, laser-cut, and assembled with the purchased arcade peripherals. This project has extensive hardware and software aspects that were developed concurrently.

Arcade emulator raspberry pi