Bringing Back the 8-Bit 1980s

May 2018

How's this for a quirky project? Micah and I decided to try to build a 1980s style arcade system from the ground up. Drilling, wiring, programming, troubleshooting ... it's all in there.


Drilling the holes in the board and attaching 2x4s was the easy part


A bit more challenging was figuring out all of the boards and circuits.


Standard arcade button sizes are 1 and 1/8th inches. Who knew?


It's not hard to find a good 8-way joystick and a Raspberry pi, the small $40 computer that runs it all.


A coat of black paint -- to contrast with the powder blue buttons -- sort of seemed to do the trick.


Wiring the buttons and the joystick.


From another angle, you can also see the spinner (lower right) we installed for Tempest!


The finished product ... well, except for all the programming ...


Booting up the Raspberry Pi


And much loading and troubleshooting later, some signs of actual games!


Some of when we were trying to figure out why it wasn't working


And then finally some 80s action!


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