This Raspberry Pi 400-Powered Dual-Screen Arcade Cabinet Is Resplendent in Radiatta Pine Plywood
Running RetroPie on an internal Raspberry Pi 400, this retro gaming gadget lets you look your opponent right in the eyes as you fight.
Pseudonymous woodworker, maker, and retro gaming enthusiast "Block After Block," hereafter simply "Block," has put together a tabletop arcade cabinet unlike others that we've seen before: the Raspberry Pi-powered machine packs two screens in a wedge-shaped plywood housing.
"Plywood edge grain is a favorite of mine," Block explains of the reason behind picking the material for the striped housing, "and I love how it looks on this project. I've been in to woodworking for about 7 years but I lived in a condo/apartment for the bulk of that time. I was a member of a makerspace (Freeside in Atlanta, GA) and that is how I learned how to use the tools. My wife and I moved in to our home 1.5 years ago and it is my first time having a garage. I do have a lot of tools but 95 percent of them are from Facebook Marketplace or were gifted to me."
The cabinet is constructed from 3/4" Radiatta pine plywood, cut and glued so as to put the edge of the material on display — giving the wood a distinctive striped appearance. The size was based on being able to fit a pair of specific HDMI monitors, picked up "really cheap" second-hand, with a wider base offering a more ergonomic tilt for tabletop use.
Inside the cabinet, apart from the monitors, is a Raspberry Pi 400 — the variant of the Raspberry Pi 4 which builds the hardware into a keyboard, and supply of which is in a better state than the often sold-out mainstream Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer models. This is connected to an HDMI splitter which feeds both monitors — showing an identical image on both, for the convenience of head-to-head players sat at opposite sides of the table.
"It's great for fighting games and other non split screen multiplayer games," Block explains of the mirrored approach. "If it is a split-screen game then both monitors would show the same thing. I used an HDMI splitter to do the mirroring because RetroPie doesn't play well with mirroring (at least from my limited research)."
A video walking through the build is available on Block's YouTube channel, with more information in the project's Reddit thread.