Amiga Arcade Machine

The quest for the ultimate Amiga experience... 
That is something different for each person.
For me, using the Amiga - the computer - is all about creativity: CREATING!

I love all those fancy Amiga OS builds like CoffinOS, Caffeine, Amikit, ....
But I always felt like the gaming experience was subpar.
For me: gaming is about that feeling you get as a kid when visiting the arcades: standing up, leaning on "the machine" , eyes glued to the screen, left hand on the joystick, right hand punching those buttons as fast as you can.

I already have an arcade machine in my office.
It's running a Pandora box with thousands of games.



It's fine, but it has one HUGE problem: No Amiga games and you can't add any!

One day I got a phone call: "Stef, can I please you with a few old iMacs?"
Duh...

They turned out to be iMacs 16.2 from 2015.
i5 intel CPU, 8GB of ram, 1 TB SSD.
Lovely machines!

Of course, not really suited as daily driver, but for Amiga emulation: perfect!

I installed Batocera.linux.
Boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy ... what an INSANEly wonderful package that is...
Unbelievable how much work, love and passion the maintainers have poured into it.
I can't recommend it enough. Go try it, it's the ULTIMATE retro gaming package.
Adding (Amiga) games is as easy as dropping the WHDLoad packages in the Batocera network share.
Run the meta-data scraper and Bob's your uncle.
One example how awesome Batocera is: it auto detects almost all games and adds the right meta data and hi-res images.
"Ok cool"
You switch to carrousel-view and these nice game logos fly by.
Suddenly you realise: "Wait ... those are transparent PNG game logos ... that didn't even EXIST when all those games came out!"
So sombody spent hours/days/weeks/months hand-crafting THOUSANDS high quality logos with only lo-res source material at hand ...
Insane. Community effort, no doubt, but still: the retro-gaming scene, that's a passionate bunch!


Yep, those Amiga games are still awesome, but ... why aren't they in an arcade cabinet?
Let's build one!

The goal is to create a "exo-skeleton" for the iMac. I still want the iMac to remain in 1 piece and easily replaceable.
To the drawing board!



Then a trip to the hardware store for some MDF panels, some shopping at our best Chinese friends and to work!

Looks matter with arcades, right?
We live in a time where getting a custom printed design on sturdy vinyl stickering only cost you a few bucks. Nice!





But but but ... some Amiga games need a keyboard, right? 
How stupid is it to plug in an external keyboard in an arcade machine?

We can fix that too.
We'll add a "hidden" drawer for a keyboard and a wireless Bluetooth controller.
This enables both wireless play and 2-player games.



Lovely.

That didn't turn out to be half bad!
I love it, it really is a VERY pleasant way to enjoy your Amiga games. 

And the best part: it's really not expensive.
OK, having a garage full of "stuff and left-overs" also doesn't hurt to keep the cost down, that and having a 3D-printer ofcourse.

I recycled as much as I could.
For example the colours of the Amiga light sign are made out of the transparent coloured plastic of used notebook-covers.
Most of the paint and black adhesive film are from flea markets, etc ...

This is the complete part list of everything I had to buy.

You can download all the Sketchup and STL files I made here.

And to conclude: here's a little video showing the process.
Game on!

Steffest - 17/09/2024