Phobos Down arcade cabinet
Years ago I built a bar-top arcade cabinet for my older local multiplayer game called Hyper Ultra Astronautics. I have been in the process of transforming the cabinet into Phobos Down cabinet and now the work is mostly done.
The hardware inside is mostly the same. I only changed the WiFi adapter to a newer one compatible with 5GHz networks. I initially thought that I would have to upgrade the GPU because the game ran only at about 40 fps which is definitely not acceptable. After upgrading to a modern Linux distribution and installing proprietary NVidia drivers, it was able to run steadily at well above 100 fps. The display has refresh rate of only 60Hz, so this is more than enough.
On the outside, there are two changes. I built a new control panel with two analog sticks with buttons and only one other button for accessing the game menu. That's about as minimal as I can get. Obviously I also needed a new marquee with the new game's logo on it. When I originally built the cabinet, I had already ordered duplicate parts for the control panel MDF board and the acrylic/polycarbonate pieces for the marquee.
Behind the control panel, there is an Arduino Micro microcontroller reading the four analog axis measurements from the sticks and three digital input signals from the buttons. The Arduino is connected to an USB port on the PC. I wrote a simple software that reads the inputs and appears as a gamepad HID device to the PC. There's a hidden button underneath the panel for entering a calibration mode which records minimum and maximum values for each analog axis and then uses those to calibrate the stick axis readings later.
Last week I took the cabinet for the first test run at a local IGDA gathering. A lot of people played the game and most of them seemed to really enjoy it. There were some frame rate drops and stuttering during the most hectic gameplay but this is something I have to address on the software side. I likely have already fixed the worst ones.
One thing with the cabinet that still bothers me is that the control panel soldering is really embarrassingly bad. Both because lack of skill and crappy equipment. The latter has improved since then, so I'm tempted to resolder all the wires back there. Otherwise I'll have to constantly worry that a soldering fails and renders the whole cabinet unplayable.
Despite this cabinet building project, Phobos Down is still primarily a PC game. You can download an alpha test version right now on Itch.io or wishlist it on Steam:
Posted on 2025-01-23